Top 100 Thomas Merton Quotes
#1. Is the basic teaching of Buddhism - on ignorance, deliverance and enlightenment - really life-denying, or is it rather the same kind of life-affirming liberation that we find in the Good News of Redemption, the Gift of the Spirit, and the New Creation?
Thomas Merton
#2. What would have been the good of my being plunged into a lot of naked suffering and emotional crisis without any prayer, any Sacrament to stabilize and order it, and make some kind of meaning out of it?
Thomas Merton
#3. The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.
Thomas Merton
#4. Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
Thomas Merton
#6. For true humility is, in a way, a very real despair: despair of myself, in order that I may hope entirely in You.
Thomas Merton
#7. Christians are now wide open to Asian religions, ready, in the words of Vatican II, to "acknowledge, preserve and promote the spiritual and moral goods" found among them.
Thomas Merton
#8. The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.
Thomas Merton
#9. God has left sin in the world in order that there may be forgiveness: not only the secret forgiveness by which He Himself cleanses our souls, but the manifest forgiveness by which we have mercy on one another and so give expression to the fact that He is living, by His mercy, in our own hearts.
Thomas Merton
#10. The peculiar grace of a shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.
Thomas Merton
#11. Stop asking yourself questions that have no meaning. Or if they have, you'll find out when you need to
find out both the questions and the answers.
Thomas Merton
#12. There are ways that seem to men to be good, the end whereof is in the depths of hell.
Thomas Merton
#13. What is the good of religion without personal spiritual direction?
Thomas Merton
#14. People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.
Thomas Merton
#15. The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done
Thomas Merton
#16. Oh, America, how I began to love your country! What miles of silences God has made in you for contemplation! If only people realized what all your mountains and forests are really for!
Thomas Merton
#17. It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.
Thomas Merton
#18. We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others.
Thomas Merton
#19. It can be said, without fear of error, that our meditation is as good as our faith.
Thomas Merton
#20. Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
Thomas Merton
#21. The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.
Thomas Merton
#22. Look for Him unless we have already found Him, and we cannot find Him unless he has first found us. We cannot begin to seek Him without a special gift of His grace, yet if we wait for grace to move us, before beginning to seek Him will probably never begin.
Thomas Merton
#23. This implies that all truly serious and spiritual forms of religion aspire at least implicitly to a contemplative awakening both of the individual and of the group.
Thomas Merton
#24. I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.
Thomas Merton
#25. I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope ... there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk.
Thomas Merton
#26. The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.
Thomas Merton
#27. Because of their enmity you will be left alone. They will cast you out and forsake you.
Thomas Merton
#28. What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?
Thomas Merton
#29. Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity.
Thomas Merton
#30. The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living.
Thomas Merton
#31. The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places.
Thomas Merton
#32. Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.
Thomas Merton
#33. Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered ...
Thomas Merton
#34. One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask.
Thomas Merton
#35. There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.
Thomas Merton
#36. instead of becoming a strong and ardent and generous Catholic, I simply slipped into the ranks of the millions of tepid and dull and sluggish and indifferent Christians who live a life that is still half animal, and who barely put up a struggle to keep the breath of grace alive in their souls.
Thomas Merton
#37. I will never be able to find myself if I isolate myself from the rest of mankind as if I were a different kind of being.
Thomas Merton
#38. I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me.
Thomas Merton
#40. The religious answer is not really religious if it's not fully real. Evasion is the answer of superstition.
Thomas Merton
#41. Get warm any way you can, and love God and pray.
Thomas Merton
#42. The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.
Thomas Merton
#43. God Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true self.
Thomas Merton
#44. Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.
Thomas Merton
#45. Ash Wednesday is full of joy ... The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust.
Thomas Merton
#46. Before we can become who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person who we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.
Thomas Merton
#47. We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of others and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us.
Thomas Merton
#48. A man becomes a solitary at the moment when, no matter what may be his external surroundings, he is suddenly aware of his own inalienable solitude and sees that he will never be anything but solitary.
Thomas Merton
#49. The Hindus are not looking for us to send them men who will build schools and hospitals, although those things are good and useful in themselves
and perhaps very badly needed in India: they want to know if we have any saints to send them.
Thomas Merton
#50. At Cincinnati, where we arrived about dawn, I asked the Traveller's Aid girl the name of some Catholic churches, and got in a taxi to go to St. Francis Xavier's, where
Thomas Merton
#51. Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason.
Thomas Merton
#52. The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order.
Thomas Merton
#53. They knew a good building would praise God better than a bad one, even if the bad one were covered all over with official symbols of praise.
Thomas Merton
#55. Books that speak like God speak with too much authority to entertain us. Those that speak like good men hold us by their human charm; we grow by finding ourselves in them.
Thomas Merton
#56. The truly sacred attitude toward life is in no sense an escape from the sense of nothingness that assails us when we are left alone with ourselves.
Thomas Merton
#57. Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good ...
Thomas Merton
#58. We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human and visible means, nor rests in any visible end. He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.
Thomas Merton
#59. The Breviary was hard to learn, and every step was labor and confusion, not to mention the mistakes and perplexities I got myself into. However,
Thomas Merton
#60. By which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves. All
Thomas Merton
#61. This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.
Thomas Merton
#62. Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.
Thomas Merton
#63. Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.
Thomas Merton
#64. The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary every day routine.
Thomas Merton
#65. Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny ... To work out our identity in God.
Thomas Merton
#66. I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may mean? I myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both.
Thomas Merton
#67. Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.
Thomas Merton
#68. Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves.
Thomas Merton
#69. Too much happiness, too much unhappiness, out of due time, men are thrown off balance. What will they do next? Thought runs wild. No control. They start everything, finish nothing. Here competition begins, here the idea of excellence is born, and robbers appear in the world.
Thomas Merton
#70. In the spiritual life there is no such thing as an indifference to love or hate.
Thomas Merton
#71. CII ABBOT PASTOR said: Just as bees are driven out by smoke, and their honey is taken away from them, so a life of ease drives out the fear of the Lord from man's soul and takes away all his good works.
Thomas Merton
#72. Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself.
Thomas Merton
#73. I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
Thomas Merton
#74. The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.
Thomas Merton
#77. The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will.
Thomas Merton
#78. There is in every intellect a natural exigency for a true concept of God: we are born with the thirst to know and to see Him, and therefore it cannot be otherwise.
Thomas Merton
#79. We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others.
Thomas Merton
#80. Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.
Thomas Merton
#81. I can depend less and less on my own power and sense of direction ... It is so strange to advance backwards and get where you are going in a totally unexpected way
Thomas Merton
#82. If you find God with great ease, perhaps it is not God you have found.
Thomas Merton
#83. It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not what he ought to be. If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we do away with him altogether.
Thomas Merton
#85. Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.
Thomas Merton
#86. No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.
Thomas Merton
#87. It is my belief, that we should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in that part of humanity that is most remote from our own.
Thomas Merton
#88. To give my freedom blindly to a being equal to or inferior to myself is to degrade myself and throw away my freedom. I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God. If
Thomas Merton
#89. Misplaced effort in the spiritual life often consists in stubbornly insisting upon compulsive routines which seem to us to be necessary because they accord with our own short-sighted notions.
Thomas Merton
#90. There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible...
Thomas Merton
#91. IT is not we who choose to awaken ourselves, but God Who chooses to awaken us.
Thomas Merton
#92. A faith that is afraid of other people is not faith at all.
Thomas Merton
#93. In meditative prayer, one thinks and speaks not only with the mind and lips, but in a certain sense with one's whole being ... All good meditative prayer is a conversation of our entire self to God.
Thomas Merton
#94. Love not only prefers the good of another to my own, but it does not even compare the two.
Thomas Merton
#95. The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.
Thomas Merton
#96. Imagination has the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new.
Thomas Merton
#97. Prayer is an expression of who we are ... We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.
Thomas Merton
#98. I am happy that I can at least want to love God. Perhaps that is all I've got, but it is already all that is essential. And He will take care of the rest.
Thomas Merton
#99. When you see God in everyone, then they see God in you.
Thomas Merton
#100. There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.
Thomas Merton
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