Top 100 Quotes About Thomas Merton
#1. I feel like, for me, reading Thomas Merton is like that. When you're a ways into it, you're five pages in, 20 pages in, 30 pages in, it seems like one of the more oxymoronic undertakings you could attempt.
Will Oldham
#2. Thomas Merton wrote, "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 will do away with him altogether."50
Eugene H. Peterson
#3. Thomas Merton says, "We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!"2
Richard J. Foster
#4. 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
#5. Thomas Merton writes that if we have meditated on the events of the Passion but have not meditated on Dachau and Auschwitz, our perception of God at work in present times is incomplete.
Richard J. Foster
#6. Thomas Merton, say it, as he so often does: A door opens in the center of our being, and we seem to fall through it into immense depths, which although they are infinite - are still accessible to us. All eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact.
Richard Rohr
#7. When sin becomes bitter, then Christ becomes sweet. Thomas Merton
Matt Chandler
#8. Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
Richard Rohr
#9. much of our rhetoric is less about persuading unbelievers, or maintaining the faith of believers, than about, as Thomas Merton put it a generation ago, our search for "an argument strong enough to prove us 'right.'"9
Russell D. Moore
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. We must make the choices that enable us
to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
Thomas Merton
#21. Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.
Thomas Merton
#22. 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
#23. Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
Thomas Merton
#25. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics.
Thomas Merton
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#37. 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
#38. We are already ONE. We just think we are separate.
Thomas Merton
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.
Thomas Merton
#42. We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us.
Thomas Merton
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. If we are to love sincerely, and with simplicity, we must first of all overcome the fear of not being loved.
Thomas Merton
#47. 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
#48. effort is necessary, enlightened, well-directed and sustained.
Thomas Merton
#49. The importance of detachment from things, the importance of poverty, is that we are supposed to be free from things that we might prefer to people. Wherever things have become more important than people, we are in trouble. That is the crux of the whole matter.
Thomas Merton
#50. God makes us ask ourselves questions most often when He intends to resolve them. He gives us needs that He alone can satisfy, and awakens capacities that He means to fulfill. Any perplexity is liable to be a spiritual gestation, leading to a new birth and a mystical regeneration.
Thomas Merton
#51. And of course most non-Catholics imagine that the Church is immensely rich, and that all Catholic institutions make money hand over fist, and that all the money is stored away somewhere to buy gold and silver dishes for the Pope and cigars for the College of Cardinals.
Thomas Merton
#52. You are certainly one of the joys of life for all who have ever come within a mile of you.
Thomas Merton
#53. You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer.
Thomas Merton
#54. Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation.
Thomas Merton
#55. 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
#56. There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.
Thomas Merton
#57. 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
#58. must become convinced and penetrated by the realization that without my love for them they may perhaps not achieve the things God has willed for them.
Thomas Merton
#59. What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.
Thomas Merton
#60. In the end, no one can seek God unless he has already begun to find him.
Thomas Merton
#61. The mercy of God demands to be known and recognized and set apart from everything else and praised and adored in joy.
Thomas Merton
#62. For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another. If my heart does not first belong to me, how can I give it to another?
Thomas Merton
#63. 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
#64. A gentle sense of humor will be alert to detect anything that savors of a pious 'act' on the part of the penitent.
Thomas Merton
#65. There are ways that seem to men to be good, the end whereof is in the depths of hell.
Thomas Merton
#66. the humble man takes whatever there is in the world that helps him to find God and leaves the rest aside. He
Thomas Merton
#67. What is the good of religion without personal spiritual direction?
Thomas Merton
#68. Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, the perfection of His love.
Thomas Merton
#69. 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
#70. It is a terrible thing to think of the grace that is wasted in this world,
Thomas Merton
#71. If you have never had any distractions you don't know how to pray.
Thomas Merton
#72. 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
#74. It is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.
Thomas Merton
#75. If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.
Thomas Merton
#76. The madman runs to the East and his keeper runs to the East, both are running to the East. Their purposes differ.
Thomas Merton
#77. The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.
Thomas Merton
#79. True happiness is not found in any other reward than that of being united with God. If I seek some other reward besides God Himself, I may get my reward but I cannot be happy.
Thomas Merton
#80. People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.
Thomas Merton
#81. 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
#82. Action is the stream, and contemplation is the spring.
Thomas Merton
#83. 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
#84. There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.
Thomas Merton
#85. 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
#86. our material riches unfortunately imply a spiritual, cultural, and moral poverty that are perhaps far greater than we see.
Thomas Merton
#87. I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to.
Thomas Merton
#88. The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
Thomas Merton
#89. 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
#90. Faith is the door to the full inner life of the Church, a life which includes not only access to an authoritative teaching but above all to a deep personal experience which is at once unique and yet shared by the whole Body of Christ, in the Spirit of Christ.
Thomas Merton
#91. 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
#93. Nevertheless, every day love corners me somewhere and surrounds me with peace without my having to look very far or very hard or do anything special. God
Thomas Merton
#94. It can be said, without fear of error, that our meditation is as good as our faith.
Thomas Merton
#95. Every man becomes the image of the God he adores.
He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead.
He who loves corruption rots.
He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow.
He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing.
Thomas Merton
#96. If we seek paradise outside ourselves, we cannot have paradise in our hearts.
Thomas Merton
#97. The distinctive characteristic of religious meditation is that it is a search for truth which springs from love and which seeks to possess the truth not only by knowledge but also by love.
Thomas Merton
#98. Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
Thomas Merton
#100. It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.
Thomas Merton
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