Thomas Merton Quotes

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

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from...

The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I hav...

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.

Be still:There is no longer any need of comment.It was a lucky windThat blew away his halo with his ...

As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can s...

The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid...

We are what we love. If we love God, in whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in him an...

In other words, I have tried to learn in my writing a monastic lesson I could probably not have lear...

True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a...

We must approach our meditation realizing that 'grace,' 'mercy,' and 'faith' are not permanent inali...

There is a 'movement' of meditation, expressing the basic 'paschal' rhythm of the Christian life, th...

Prayer does not blind us to the world, but it transforms our vision of the world, and makes us see i...

We are not only contingent beings, dependent on the love and will of a Creator whom we cannot know e...

Hence the aim of meditation, in the context of Christian faith, is not to arrive at an objective and...

The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagi...

Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on va...

The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being elimi...

Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law...

It is true that neither the ancient wisdoms nor the modern sciences are complete in themselves. They...

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those...

In the use of force, one simplifies the situation by assuming that the evil to be overcome is clear-...

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

His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decoration or superfluo...

The point where you become free not to kill, not to exploit, not to destroy, not to compete, because...

To enter into the realm of contemplation, one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact...

We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real...and the hidden, inn...

Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our...

When men live huddled together without true communication, there seems to be a greater sharing, and ...

The ever-changing reality in the midst of which we live should awaken us to the possibility of an un...

Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created fo...

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying [God]....

The complacency of the individual who admires his own excellence is bad enough, but it is more respe...

Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own s...

For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God'...

Our Christian destiny is, in fact, a great one: but we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all i...

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not t...

The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole...

Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not w...

The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on th...

One came out of the church with a kind of comfortable and satisfied feeling that something had been ...

One of the effects of original sin is an instinctive prejudice in favour of our own selfish desires....

Every man becomes the image of the God he adores.He whose worship is directed to a dead thing become...

Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without th...

It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity i...

The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the ...

It is the will of God that we live not only as rational beings, but as 'new men' regenerated by the ...

Who is willing to be satisfied with a job that expresses all his limitations? He will accept such wo...

God has left sin in the world in order that there may be forgiveness: not only the secret forgivenes...

Those who refuse His mercy satisfy His justice in another way. Without His mercy, they cannot love H...

To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no...

It is by the Holy Spirit that we love those who are united to us in Christ. The more plentifully we ...

It is therefore of supreme importance that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others. When...

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

The married man and the mother of a Christian family, if they are faithful to their obligations, wil...

Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude i...

I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and ...

Bodily agitation, then, is an enemy to the spirit. And by agitation I do not necessarily mean exerci...

It is not merely our own desire but the desire of Christ in His Spirit that drives us to grow in lov...

We cannot find Him unless we know we need Him. We forget this need when we take a self-sufficient pl...

The wise man has struggled to find You in his wisdom, and he has failed. The just man has striven to...

Do not desire chiefly to be cherished and consoled by God; desire above all to love Him.Do not anxio...

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

A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the ...

To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, ...

The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so tha...

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

The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But afte...

There is something in the depths of our being that hungers for wholeness and finality. Because we ar...

We must be willing to accept the bitter truth that, in the end, we may have to become a burden to th...

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

We overcome the evil in the world by the charity and compassion of God, and in so doing we drive all...

Most of the world is either asleep or dead. The religious people are, for the most part, asleep. The...

The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer...

True happiness is not found in any other reward than that of being united with God. If I seek some o...

Art enables us to find ourselves and loose ourselves at the same time.

The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround ...

Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking abo...

If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own,...

Consequently, the truth of God lives in our souls more by the power of superior moral courage than b...

And yet with every wound You robbed me of a crime,And as each blow was paid with Blood,You paid me a...

The lights of prayer that make us imagine we are beginning to be angels are sometimes only signs tha...

Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it o...

Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by re...

I was not sure where I was going, and I could not see what I would do when I got [there]. But you sa...

Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended an...

Whether you teach or live in the cloister or nurse the sick, whether you are in religion or out of i...

There are different kinds of fear. One of the most terrible is the sensation that you are likely to ...

I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: t...

The deepest need of our darkness is to comprehend the light which shines in the midst of it.

No one can find God without having first been found by Him. A monk is a man who seeks God because he...

The story of the Fall tells us in mythical language that "original sin" is not simply a stigma arbit...

Modern man, in so far as he is still Cartesian (he is of course going far beyond Descartes in many r...

It is this kind of consciousness, exacerbated to an extreme, which has made inevitable the so called...

As a matter of face, Zen is at present most fashionable in America among those who are least concern...

Faith is the door to the full inner life of the Church, a life which includes not only access to an ...

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for c...

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

If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own be...