Thomas Merton quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Thomas Merton on Wise Famous Quotes.

We do not exist for ourselves.

A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book.

If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest God, does not bless our work.

What we have to be is what we are.

Love is free; it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love's sake.

The only unhappiness is not to love God.

Ash Wednesday is full of joy ... The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust.

Meditation is one of the ways in which the spiritual man keeps himself awake.

No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.

Violence is essentially wordless. and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.

I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place ... It is certainly part of my life of prayer.

Action is the stream, and contemplation is the spring.

The fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the wind, and join in the general Dance.

Charity is without fear: having given all that it has, it has nothing left to lose.

There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude.

Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.

effort is necessary, enlightened, well-directed and sustained.

Love is a special way of being alive.

To place your trust in visible things is to live in despair.

The religious answer is not really religious if it's not fully real. Evasion is the answer of superstition.

In the spiritual life there is no such thing as an indifference to love or hate.

The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.

Father," I answered, "I want to give God everything.

By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence.

The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith.

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

Love not only prefers the good of another to my own, but it does not even compare the two.

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

Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God.

My best writing has always been in journals.

The problem today is that there are no deserts, only dude ranches.

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

Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand.

Those who think they 'know' from the beginning will never in fact
come to know anything.

The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe.

The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.

I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.

To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions.

To be unknown to God is entirely too much privacy.

He excels in giving irrelevant information.

If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him.

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.

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.

The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself.

Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.

Man is not at peace with his fellow man because he is not at peace with himself. He is not at peace with himself because he is not at peace with God.

the humble man takes whatever there is in the world that helps him to find God and leaves the rest aside. He

The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow.

My mother was informing me, by mail, that she was about to die, and would never see me again.

It can be said, without fear of error, that our meditation is as good as our faith.

Love triumphs, at least in this life, not by eliminating evil once for all, but by resisting and overcoming it anew every day.

Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God.

Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.

And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.

Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are.

The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear.

God Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true self.

Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.

Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.

But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.

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.

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?

There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible...

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.

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

I don't even need to know precisely what I am doing, except that I am acting for the love of God.

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

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

Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.

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.

We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation

Love is its own reward ...

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

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

We put words between ourselves and things.

Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.

Pride makes us artificial; humility makes us real

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

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.

Those who are not grateful soon begin to complain of everything.

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.

When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago.

In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.

Into this world, this demented inn
in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ comes uninvited.

Humility is the surest sign of strength.

To be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.

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

The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.

As soon as one is conscious of the presence of the Master, one must, in all passivity, abandon the work to Him.

The tighter you squeeze, the less you have.

Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.

In Silence God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.

Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,

The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive of perception.

O God, my God, the night has values that the day never dreamed of.

A Christian is committed to the belief that Love and Mercy are the most powerful forces on earth.

Love is our true destiny.

You are certainly one of the joys of life for all who have ever come within a mile of you.

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