Thomas Merton Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Thomas Merton quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book.
— Thomas Merton
If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest God, does not bless our work.
— Thomas Merton
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
The only unhappiness is not to love God.
— Thomas Merton
You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt.
— Thomas Merton
When ambition ends, happiness begins.
— Thomas Merton
Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.
— Thomas Merton
The madman runs to the East and his keeper runs to the East, both are running to the East. Their purposes differ.
— Thomas Merton
There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude.
— Thomas Merton
I see no contradiction between Buddhism and Christianity ... I intend to become as good a Buddhist as I can.
— Thomas Merton
For although he is right with us and in and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find Him.
— Thomas Merton
effort is necessary, enlightened, well-directed and sustained.
— Thomas Merton
My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear.
— Thomas Merton
Love is a special way of being alive.
— Thomas Merton
To place your trust in visible things is to live in despair.
— Thomas Merton
The religious answer is not really religious if it's not fully real. Evasion is the answer of superstition.
— Thomas Merton
By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence.
— Thomas Merton
The sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.
— Thomas Merton
Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.
— Thomas Merton
The biggest disease in North America is busyness.
— Thomas Merton
If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is "just glass."
— Thomas Merton
One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife.
— Thomas Merton
We discover our true selves in love.
— Thomas Merton
Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
— Thomas Merton
Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.
— Thomas Merton
The root of war is fear.
— Thomas Merton
Prayer is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him ... who loves us, who is near to us ...
— Thomas Merton
We love the things we pretend to laugh at.
— Thomas Merton
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
In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question.
— Thomas Merton
Today will never come again.
— Thomas Merton
People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.
— Thomas Merton
My God, I pray better to you by breathing. I pray better to you by walking than by talking.
— Thomas Merton
To be a saint is to be yourself.
— Thomas Merton
Christ is born to us today, in order that he may appear to the whole world through us.
— Thomas Merton
I don't even need to know precisely what I am doing, except that I am acting for the love of God.
— Thomas Merton
Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty.
— Thomas Merton
But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.
— Thomas Merton
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
Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38
— Thomas Merton
On Pride: This sickness is most dangerous when it succeeds in looking like humility. When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless.
— Thomas Merton
The great thing, and the only thing, is to adore and praise GOD.
— Thomas Merton
I shall lead you through the loneliness, the solitude you will not understand; but it is my shortcut to your soul.
— Thomas Merton
How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me?
— Thomas Merton
For he who knows does not speak, He who speaks does not know" (12) And "The Wise Man gives instruction Without the use of speech." (13)
— Thomas Merton
There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible...
— Thomas Merton
To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God.
— Thomas Merton
Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.
— Thomas Merton
Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love ...
— Thomas Merton
In the western part of England lived a gentleman of large fortune, whose name was Merton.
— Thomas Day
There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics.
— Thomas Merton
The end of the world will be legal.
— Thomas Merton
True encounter with Christ liberates something within us, a power we did not know we had, a capacity to grow and change.
— Thomas Merton
We put words between ourselves and things.
— Thomas Merton
Stagnation and inactivity bring spiritual death.
— Thomas Merton
Lovely morning! How lovely life can be!
— Thomas Merton
The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.
— Thomas Merton
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
Pride makes us artificial; humility makes us real
— Thomas Merton
If we are to love sincerely, and with simplicity, we must first of all overcome the fear of not being loved.
— Thomas Merton
Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.
— Thomas Merton
For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness
— Thomas Merton
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
To worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell.
— Thomas Merton
Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.
— Thomas Merton
Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.
— Thomas Merton
Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.
— Thomas Merton
We must make the choices that enable usto fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves. — Thomas Merton
Love, in fact, is the spiritual life; and without it, all other exercises of the spirit are emptied of content.
— Thomas Merton
Whose silence are you?
— Thomas Merton
The love of pleasure is destined by its very nature to defeat itself and end in frustration.
— Thomas Merton
There are ways that seem to men to be good, the end whereof is in the depths of hell.
— Thomas Merton
We are united to Him in darkness, because we have to hope.
— Thomas Merton
There should be at least a room or some corner where no one will find you and disturb you or notice you.
— Thomas Merton
Silence is not broken by speech, but by the anxiety to be heard.
— Thomas Merton
The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.
— Thomas Merton
For our duties and our needs, in all the fundamental things for which we were created, come down in practice to the same thing.
— Thomas Merton
The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds
— Thomas Merton
We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation
— Thomas Merton
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
Love is its own reward ...
— Thomas Merton
