Popular

Browse Popular Topics

Quotes by Thomas Merton

A daydream is an evasion.
– Thomas Merton
A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
– Thomas Merton
Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
– Thomas Merton
An author in a Trappist monastery is like a duck in a chicken coop. And he would give anything in the world to be a chicken instead of a duck.
– Thomas Merton
Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.
– Thomas Merton
By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
– 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 reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
– 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
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
It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God.
– Thomas Merton
Men in bowlers and dark suits with their rolled-up umbrellas. Men full of propriety, calm and proud, neat and noble.
– Thomas Merton
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.
– Thomas Merton
Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
– Thomas Merton
So Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me, and I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom.
– Thomas Merton
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.
– Thomas Merton
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
– Thomas Merton
The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
– Thomas Merton
The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.
– Thomas Merton
The tighter you squeeze, the less you have.
– Thomas Merton
The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.
– Thomas Merton
The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
– Thomas Merton
There was this shadow, this double, this writer who had followed me into the cloister. He rides my shoulders I cannot lose him.
– Thomas Merton
We do not exist for ourselves.
– Thomas Merton
We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of men and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us.
– Thomas Merton
We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.
– Thomas Merton
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
– Thomas Merton
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
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.
– Thomas Merton
Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.
– Thomas Merton
When ambition ends, happiness begins.
– Thomas Merton
Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
– Thomas Merton
Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.
– Thomas Merton
The least of learning is done in the classrooms.
– Thomas Merton
The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.
– Thomas Merton
We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.
– Thomas Merton
We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.
– Thomas Merton
The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.
– Thomas Merton
Perhaps I am stronger than I think.
– Thomas Merton
Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.
– 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
Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.
– Thomas Merton
If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.
– Thomas Merton
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.
– Thomas Merton
Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.
– Thomas Merton
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
– Thomas Merton