Thomas Merton Quotes

For me to be a saint means to be myself.

The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places.

To hope is to risk frustration. Make up your mind to risk frustration.

God has brought me to Kentucky...the precise place he has chosen for my sanctification.

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68

When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.

True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.

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

The root of war is fear.

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

In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart.

How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city?

Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.

But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.

If you have love you will do all things well.

Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost

Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains.

Teach me to go to the country beyond words and beyond names.

We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us.

We must slow down to a human tempo and we’ll begin to have time to listen.

Ultimately faith is the only key to the universe. The final meaning of human existence, and the answers to the questions on which all our happiness depends cannot be found in any other way.

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.

My God, I pray better to you by breathing and walking than by talking, just as in choir I sing best when I am thinking about something else, or better still, praying.

Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.

Love is its own reward.

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

The least of the work of learning is done in classrooms.

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.

Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love.

To love blindly is to love selfishly, because the goal of such love is not the real advantage of the beloved but only the exercise of love in our own souls.

Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.

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

It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.

A daydream is an evasion.

October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.

Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God.

Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.

And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.

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

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.

Take more time, cover less ground.

To worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell.

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

While some men see ordinary happenings, others see divine light and guidance.

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

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.

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.

The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude.

The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.

The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living.