Thomas Merton Quotes (60 Quotes)


    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.

    Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

    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.

    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.



    The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.

    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.

    Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.

    Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation.

    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.

    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.


    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.

    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.

    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.

    At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.

    A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

    Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all others.

    Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.

    What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.

    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.

    We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.

    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.

    The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.

    It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God.

    To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.

    Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

    I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and happening, and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it.

    The desire to kill is like the desire to attack another with a red hot iron. I have to pick up the incandescent metal and burn my own hand while burning the other person. Hate itself is the seed of death in my own heart while it seeks death of another. Love is the seed of life in my own heart while it seeks the good of another.

    Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.

    The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

    To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times.


    Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.

    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.

    We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.

    If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.

    The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacythe strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men. A weird life it is to be living always in somebody elses imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could become real.

    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.

    ... the degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.

    The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.

    I believe we are going to have to prepare ourselves for the difficult and patient task of outgrowing rigid and intransigent nationalism, and work slowly towards a world federation of peaceful nations. How will this be possible Don't ask me. I don't know. But unless we develop a moral, spiritual, and political wisdom that is proportionate to our technological skill, our skill may end us.

    We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of men and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us.

    The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.

    Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.

    I am willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them -- the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings.

    Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

    Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.

    Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone-we find it with another.

    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.


    More Thomas Merton Quotations (Based on Topics)


    God - Life - Man - World - Religions & Spirituality - Love - Education - Desire - Time - War & Peace - Truth - Temptation - Solitude - Happiness - Light - Christianity - Violence - Hell - Listening - View All Thomas Merton Quotations

    Related Authors


    Zig Ziglar - Virginia Woolf - Og Mandino - Napolean Hill - Nicholas Sparks - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelle - Lewis Carroll - Horatio Alger - Harriet Beecher Stowe - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


Page 1 of 2 1 2

Authors (by First Name)

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M
N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

Other Inspiring Sections