Thomas Merton - Live Quotes

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Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.

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

Thomas Merton
Contradictions have always existed in the soul of [individuals]. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.

Thomas Merton
What I do is live, how I pray is breathe, what I wear is pants.

Thomas Merton
It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.

Thomas Merton
A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.

Thomas Merton
A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.

Thomas Merton
There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves.

Thomas Merton
Our culture is one which is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self. We live in a state of constant semi-attention.

Thomas Merton
The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them that the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which God is satisfied," and after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men.

Thomas Merton