Thomas Merton 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

If you find God with great ease, perhaps it is not God you have found. — 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

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

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

We believe, not because we want to know, but because we want to be. — Thomas Merton

Today will never come again. — Thomas Merton

If you found God with great ease, perhaps it's not God that you have found. — Thomas Merton

People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell. — Thomas Merton

Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything. — 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

When we are strong, we are always much greater than the things that happen to us. — Thomas Merton

Our sorry idiot life, our idiot existence, idiot not because it has to be but because it is not what it could be with a little more courage and care. — Thomas Merton

The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around. — 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

God, have mercy on me in the blindness in which I hope I am seeking You! — 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

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

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

Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in 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

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

In the western part of England lived a gentleman of large fortune, whose name was Merton. — Thomas Day

When sin becomes bitter, then Christ becomes sweet. Thomas Merton — Matt Chandler

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

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

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

IT is not we who choose to awaken ourselves, but God Who chooses to awaken us. — 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

In the end, no one can seek God unless he has already begun to find him. — Thomas Merton

We must make the choices that enable us
to 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

Duty does not have to be dull. Love can make it beautiful and fill it with life. — Thomas Merton

True happiness is found in unselfish Love, A love which increases in proportion as it is shared. — Thomas Merton

It is a terrible thing to think of the grace that is wasted in this world, — Thomas Merton