Top 100 Merton's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man's reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole.
Thomas Merton
#3. I think in the case of my father, in terms of the things that influenced me, he never pressed me to go into academics or pressed me to go to a field, and indeed, my behavior was largely to move as far the other direction. I don't think that's uncommon with people with very successful parents.
Robert C. Merton
#4. God, Who is everywhere, never leaves us. Yet He seems sometimes to be present, sometimes to be absent. If we do not know Him well, we do not realize that He may be more present to us when He is absent than when He is present.
Thomas Merton
#5. The thing about improvisation is that it's not about what you say. It's listening to what other people say. It's about what you hear.
Paul Merton
#6. Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.
Thomas Merton
#7. For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one's own contingent self, cannot exist where there is no contingent self to which anything can be attributed.
Thomas Merton
#8. If you persist in trying To attain what is never attained (It is Tao's gift!) If you persist in making effort To obtain what effort cannot get; If you persist in reasoning About what cannot be understood, You will be destroyed By the very thing you seek.
Thomas Merton
#9. But the one counsel he did give me is something that I will not easily forget: There are many beautiful mystical books written by the Christians. You should read St. Augustine's Confessions, and The Imitation of Christ
Thomas Merton
#10. O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't.
Thomas Merton
#11. Maybe there's a perception of me as grumpy old bugger who suffers from depression. It's a total misconception. I don't think of myself as any grumpier than the next person. I'm not even grumpy first thing in the morning.
Paul Merton
#12. Every breath we draw is a gift of God's love; every moment of existence is a grace.
Thomas Merton
#13. In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.
Thomas Merton
#14. 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
#15. Junk bonds prove there's nothing magical in a Aaa bond rating.
Merton Miller
#16. Everyone recognizes that's a joke because obviously the number and shape of the pieces doesn't affect the size of the pizza. And similarly, the stocks, bonds, warrants, etc., issued don't affect the aggregate value of the firm.
Merton Miller
#17. I was worried before I saw the play, thinking I don't really want to see a play about Thomas Merton. He probably wouldn't have either, ideally. Then it isn't. It's more about us and it's about our relationship to what he may or may not have thought about. It's its own thing completely.
Will Oldham
#18. The economics favour one-man comedy shows: all you need is one person, a microphone and a PA system. But I'm pleased so many people are making a living out of comedy - it's a wonderful business to be in.
Paul Merton
#19. One week before my 17th birthday, I had a blind date with June Rose, a television actress on network soap operas, a model, and a regular on the popular Dick Clark's Saturday night 'American Bandstand' show from New York. We were married five years later, one week after my graduation from Columbia.
Robert C. Merton
#20. Neither of my parents suffered from the little spooky prejudices that devour the people who know nothing but automobiles and movies and what's in the ice-box and what's in the papers and which neighbors are getting a divorce.
Thomas Merton
#21. The religious answer is not really religious if it's not fully real. Evasion is the answer of superstition.
Thomas Merton
#22. In the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong.
Thomas Merton
#23. To Serve the God of Love one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to love in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one's neighbor.
Thomas Merton
#24. Infinite sharing is the law of God s inner life.
Thomas Merton
#25. Hullo, Brother," I said. He recognized me, glanced at the suitcase and said: "This time have you come to stay?" "Yes, Brother, if you'll pray for me," I said. Brother nodded, and raised his hand to close the window. "That's what I've been doing," he said, "praying for you.
Thomas Merton
#26. One opens the inner doors of one's heart to the infinite silences of the Spirit, out of whose abysses love wells up without fail and gives itself to all.
Thomas Merton
#27. Love is free; it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love's sake.
Thomas Merton
#28. Suzuki also frequently quotes a sentence of Eckhart's: "The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me" (Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 50) as an exact expression of what Zen means by Prajna.
Thomas Merton
#29. It seems like a contradiction, but the shy person who is a performer actually does make sense, because in a way, when you're young and shy, making people laugh is a good way to make friends. It's an instant connection.
Paul Merton
#30. His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decoration or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God's creation to bear witness for itself.
Thomas Merton
#31. 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
#32. If you found God with great ease, perhaps it's not God that you have found.
Thomas Merton
#33. A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying [God]. It "consents," so to speak, to [God's] creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree
Thomas Merton
#34. Monastic prayer begins not so much with "considerations" as with a "return to the heart," finding one's deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being
Thomas Merton
#35. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your journey if you take the road to another man's city?(100)
Thomas Merton
#36. If we examine ourselves carefully we shall see most of us have an enormous amount of unfinished business ... We have to be free so that we can just step across the line and that's it. That is what real freedom is.
Thomas Merton
#37. The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.
Thomas Merton
#38. As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper, so the mystery of Christ in the Gospel concentrates the rays of God's light and fire to a point to set fire to the human spirit.
Thomas Merton
#39. The Mass is a memorial of Christ's sacrifice, not in the sense of an exterior commemoration, but as a living and supremely efficacious re-presentation of that sacrifice, pouring out into our hearts the redemptive power of the Cross and the grace of the resurrection, which enables us to live in God.
Thomas Merton
#40. I never give anyone advice: it can backfire horribly. In the 1950s, Eric Morecambe told Ken Dodd to get his teeth fixed. But those teeth turned out to be one of Dodd's big selling points.
Paul Merton
#41. Love is perfect in proportion to it's freedom.
Thomas Merton
#42. For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.
Thomas Merton
#43. Matt Merton comes back and explains that last week's show on suicide, in which the parents watched a reenactment of their son's suicide, was a healing process for the parents, then shows a video of the parents admitting it was a healing process. ("Sea Oak")
George Saunders
#44. For the sinful self is not my real self, it is not the self YOU have wanted for me, only the self that I have wanted : And I no longer want this false self. But now, Father, I come to You in your own Son's self ... and it is He Who Presents me to You.
Thomas Merton
#45. The wisdom of the flesh is a judgement that the ordinary ends of our natural appetites are the goods to which the whole of man's life are to be ordered. Therefore it inevitably inclines the will to violate God's law.
Thomas Merton
#46. Generally speaking, politicians are an odd bunch. They seem to have very thick skins and genuinely don't care what people think. And charm is a very important part of the politician's armoury. I try to resist that kind of charm.
Paul Merton
#47. Spirit of love and communion, give me grace to understand the mind of Christ. Let me do his will by obedience to the revelation of the Father's will that all of us be "one body." I cannot understand the depths of this mystery. Give me the grace to love it.
The Merton Institute For Contemplative Living
#48. The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God's will and his grace.
Thomas Merton
#49. We do not pray for the sake of praying, but for the sake of being heard. We do not pray in order to listen to ourselves praying but in order that God may hear us and answer us. Also, we do not pray in order to receive just any answer: it must be God's answer.
Thomas Merton
#50. 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
#51. All things are yours and you are Christ's - and Christ is God's. If we live, we live unto God. If we die, we die unto God - whether we live or die, we are God's possession." What more could anyone ask?
Thomas Merton
#52. 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
#53. I am earth, earth My heart's love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected
Thomas Merton
#54. My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation.
Robert C. Merton
#55. Good Shepherd, You have a wild and crazy sheep in love with thorns and brambles. But please don't get tired of looking for me! I know You won't. For You have found me. All I have to do is stay found.
Thomas Merton
#56. There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics.
Thomas Merton
#57. If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology. For religion goes beyond words and actions, and attains to the ultimate Truth only in silence and Love.
Thomas Merton
#58. To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.
Thomas Merton
#60. I really don't take any interest at all in contemporary comedy.
Paul Merton
#61. In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
Thomas Merton
#63. Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
Thomas Merton
#64. In fact, I don't watch a lot of contemporary comedy for fear of being influenced by it.
Paul Merton
#65. Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.
Thomas Merton
#66. We must make the choices that enable us
to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
Thomas Merton
#67. If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.
Thomas Merton
#68. 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
#69. Confucious and the Madman (excerpt)
The cinnamon tree is edible: so it is cut down!
The lacquer tree is profitable: they maim it.
Every man knows how useful it is to be useful.
No one seems to know
How useful it is to be useless.
Thomas Merton
#70. Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.
Thomas Merton
#71. 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
#72. Every moment and every event of everyman's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men.
Thomas Merton
#73. 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
#74. If it is awakened, it communicates a new life to the intelligence in which it lives, so that it becomes a living awareness of itself: and this awareness is not so much something that we ourselves have, as something that we are. It is a new and indefinable quality of our living being.
Thomas Merton
#75. We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.
Thomas Merton
#76. In a world of noise, confusion and conflict it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace. In such places love can blossom.
Thomas Merton
#77. There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude.
Thomas Merton
#78. I think having an outsider's viewpoint is interesting and good, especially for a comedian.
Paul Merton
#79. I read every book about Buster Keaton and Chaplin to see how they worked - it's all about dedication, tunnel vision, pursuit of perfection, getting the gag right.
Paul Merton
#80. It seems to me that the darkness that has troubled you ... comes from one very serious source. Without wanting to be in conflict with the truth and with the will of God, we are actually going against God's will and His teaching.
Thomas Merton
#81. There is a subtle but inescapable connection between the "sacred" attitude and the acceptance of one's in most self.
Thomas Merton
#82. Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk's life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.
Thomas Merton
#83. He's not a safe safe or a tame God, securely lodged behind the bars of a distant Heaven; He has the most annoying manner of showing up when we least want Him; of confronting us in the strangest ways.
Thomas Merton
#84. Love is ... like a spring coming up out of the ground of our own depths. "I am gift." All that I am is something that's given, and given freely. Being doesn't cost anything. There's no price tag, no strings attached.
Thomas Merton
#85. The reality of a person is a deep and hidden thing, buried not only in the invisible recesses of man's own metaphysical secrecy but in the secrecy of God Himself.
Thomas Merton
#86. If there's 10,000 people looking at the stocks and trying to pick winners, one in 10,000 is going to score, by chance alone, a great coup, and that's all that's going on. It's a game, it's a chance operation, and people think they are doing something purposeful ... but they're really not.
Merton Miller
#87. A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions, is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of "choice" when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses.
Thomas Merton
#88. No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
Thomas Merton
#89. Curiously, the most serious religious people, or the most concerned scholars, those who constantly read the Bible as a matter of professional or pious duty, can often manage to evade a radically involved dialogue with the book they are questioning.
Thomas Merton
#90. We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us.
Thomas Merton
#91. Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.
Thomas Merton
#92. October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.
Thomas Merton
#93. I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.
Thomas Merton
#94. We are already ONE. We just think we are separate.
Thomas Merton
#95. The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God.
Thomas Merton
#97. In 1986, I was attacked in the street as I helped Neil Mullarkey from the Comedy Store Players to put up posters. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time - midnight - and we were English. I got kicked in the head.
Paul Merton
#99. The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.
Thomas Merton
#100. 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
