Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice and mediocrity and materialism and selfishness that have chilled his faith. (Thomas Merton)
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. (Thomas Merton)
Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience. (Thomas Merton)
We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time. God manifests Himself everywhere, in everything in people and in things and in nature and in events ... The only thing is we don't see it. ... I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere. (Thomas Merton)
The tighter you squeeze, the less you have. (Thomas Merton)
The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little. (Thomas Merton)
We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God. (Thomas Merton)
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony. (Thomas Merton)
Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation. (Thomas Merton)
An author in a Trappist monastery is like a duck in a chicken coop. And he would give anything in the world to be a chicken instead of a duck. (Thomas Merton)
The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt. (Thomas Merton)
The goal of fasting is inner unity. This means hearing but not with the ear hearing, but not with the understanding it is hearing with the spirit, with your whole being.... The hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear, or to the mind. Hence, it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind. Fasting of the heart empties the faculties, frees you from limitations and from preoccupations. (Thomas Merton)
By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet. (Thomas Merton)
It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say. (Thomas Merton)