Thomas Merton Quotes

There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.

I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.

In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question.

We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it.

It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God.

Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.

What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?

Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it.

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

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

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.

The end of the world will be legal.

This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.

If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.

The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.

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

The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.

Stop thinking and start looking.

Love is an intensification of life.

I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God.

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

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

In the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong.

Humility is the surest sign of strength.

Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.

There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying Him.... The more a tree is like itself, the more it is like Him.

For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.

Love is the door to eternity.

Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.

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

My best writing has always been in journals.

I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is.

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

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.

One opens the inner doors of one's heart to the infinite silences of the Spirit, out of whose abysses love wells up without fail and gives itself to all.

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

What do you want to want to be, anyway?" "I don't know; I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic." "What you should say"--he told me--"what you should say is that you want to be a saint.

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

The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.

Love is perfect in proportion to it's freedom.

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs; activism and overwork.

One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife.

True happiness is not found in any other reward than that of being united with God. If I seek some other reward besides God Himself, I may get my reward but I cannot be happy.

Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.

Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.

If we are to love sincerely, and with simplicity, we must first of all overcome the fear of not being loved.

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

There should be at least a room or some corner where no one will find you and disturb you or notice you.