Thomas Merton Quotes

We are each other's destiny.

There is a destiny which makes us brothers; none goes his way alone. All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own.

To say, my fate is not tied to your fate, is like saying your end of the boat is sinking.

We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny . . . I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be.

In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be... This is the inter-related structure of reality.

The destinies of men are woven one with the other, and you can turn aside from them no more than you can turn aside from your own.

There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences

How spiritually blind are men that they fail to see that we are bound together. We rise or fall together; we are dwarfed or godlike, free or chained, together.

The main thing I wanted to say, and thankfully it’s what most people say they get out of the book, is simply an acknowledgement that we do affect each other in ways we can’t predict.

...he was part of a family whether he wanted to be or not, the family of humanity, more often than not a frustrating and contentious clan, flawed and often deeply confused, but also periodically noble and admirable, with a common destiny that every member shared.

We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.

We don't know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.

I’m a big fan of history—applying the lessons as well as the joys and sadness. If we pay attention, we would see how we affect each other. In terms of time, we are not that far from one another. If we were to look back a century, it would seem like a long time; but, if we look at it by decades then it’s only 10 years, and by generations it’s only five.

Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.

Every life, no matter how isolated, touches hundred of others. It's up to us to decide if those micro connections are positive or negative. But whichever we decide, it does impact the ones we deal with.

I change the world, the world changes me.

Individuals do not meet by chance. They are necessary in the experiences of others, though they may not always use their opportunities in a spiritual way or manner.

We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn.

We are not living in a private world of our own. Everything we say and do and think has its effect on everything around us.

Our actions - and inaction - touch people every day, people we may never know and never meet.

Life is not a fist. Life is an open hand waiting for some other hand to enter it.

Life treads on life, and heart on heart; We press too close in church and mart To keep a dream or grave apart.

But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people--first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy.

The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.

Who knows what part we play in other people's dreams?