Thomas Merton Quotes

362 Sourced Quotes

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 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.

Thomas Merton
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 reaching to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.

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

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

Thomas Merton
It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as Gods will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe youtry to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as Gods will yourself!

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

Thomas Merton
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.

Thomas Merton
You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer.

Thomas Merton
Modern man believes he is fruitful and productive when his ego is aggressively affirmed, when he is visibly active, and when his action produces obvious results.

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
Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.

Thomas Merton
I am against war, against violence, against violent revolution, for peaceful settlement of differences, for nonviolent but nevertheless radical changes. Change is needed, and violence will not really change anything: at most it will only transfer power from one set of bull-headed authorities to another.

Thomas Merton
Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves.

Thomas Merton
Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.

Thomas Merton
The gift of love is the gift of the power and capacity to love, and therefore, to give love with full effect is also to receive it. So love can only be kept by being given away, and it can only be given perfectly when it is also received.

Thomas Merton
The land which thou goest to possess is not like the land of Egypt from whence thou camest out... For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord...Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near...Why do you spend money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which doth not satisfy you?

Thomas Merton
May we all grow in grace and peace and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us.

Thomas Merton
To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God.

Thomas Merton
It is my belief, that we should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in that part of humanity that is most remote from our own.

Thomas Merton
What does it mean to know and experience my own nothingness? It is not enough to turn away in disgust from my illusions and faults and mistakes, to separate myself from them as if they were not, and as if I were someone other than myself. This kind of self-annihilati on is only a worse illusion, it is a pretended humility which, by saying I am nothing I mean in effect I wish I were not what I am.

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

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

Thomas Merton
Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself.

Thomas Merton
We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the thing necessary for us-whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need

Thomas Merton
Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.

Thomas Merton
To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason.

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

Thomas Merton
Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.

Thomas Merton
October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and crimson, and all the lassitudes of August have seeped out of your blood, and you are full of ambition. It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all.

Thomas Merton