There is a ‘movement’ of meditation, expressing the basic ‘paschal’ rhythm of the Christian life, the passage from death to life in Christ. Sometimes prayer, meditation and contemplation are ‘death’ – a kind of descent...

The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped...

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. (Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68)

Our Christian destiny is, in fact, a great one: but we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. For our own idea of greatness is illusory, and if we pay too...

Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.