292 Inspiring Quotes by Thomas Merton

Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life.

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice.

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.

We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.

They were in the world and not of it -- not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.

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

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

Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.

I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to.

Our real journey in life is interior.

Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked.

Into this world, this demented inn
in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ comes uninvited.

Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn't already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.

There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude.

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.

Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty.

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.

Saints are what they are not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everyone else.

May God prevent us from becoming "right-thinking men"-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.

The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.

The tighter you squeeze, the less you have.

Lovely morning! How lovely life can be!

We cannot possess the truth fully until it has entered into the very substance of our life by good habits, and by a certain perfection of moral activity.

The gate of heaven is everywhere.

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

The art of our time, sacred art included, will necessarily be characterized by a certain poverty, grimness and roughness which correspond to the violent realities of a cruel age.

There were only a few shepherds at the first Bethlehem. The ox and the donkey understood more of the first Christmas than the high priests in Jerusalem. And it is the same today.

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

We do not see God in contemplation -- we know Him by love: for his pure love and when we taste the experience of loving God for his own sake alone, we know by experience who and what he is.

The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth.

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.

If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.

Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally.

it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.

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

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.

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

Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good.

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

No matter how ruined man and his world may seem to be, and no matter how terrible man's despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning.

The great thing, and the only thing, is to adore and praise 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.

There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.

To be alone by being part of the universe-fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without.

The goal of fasting is inner unity.

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.

Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand.

Love is free; it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love's sake.

Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.

Spread abroad the name of Jesus in humility and with a meek heart; show him your feebleness, and he will become your strength.

Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.

Love winter when the plant says nothing.

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.

Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.

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

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.

Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the other.... The whole purpose of life is to live by love.

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

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.

God, have mercy on me in the blindness in which I hope I am seeking You!

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.

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.

Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity.

Humility is the surest sign of strength.

Love is not a mere emotion or sentiment. It is the lucid and ardent responses of the whole person to a value that is revealed to him as perfect.

We are not converted only once in our lives but many times and this endless series of conversions and inner revolutions leads to our transformation.

The biggest disease in North America is busyness.

Pardon all runners, All speechless, alien winds, All mad waters. Pardon their impulses, Their wild attitudes, Their young flights, their reticence. When a message has no clothes on How can it be spoken.

Even when it speaks, humility listens.

The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.

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

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.

We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of others and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us.

He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.

We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others.

The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.

The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.

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.

I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.

The only influence that can really upset the injustice and iniquity of men is the power that breathes in the Christian tradition, renewing our participation in the Life that is the Light of men.

Prayer is an expression of who we are...We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.

The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.

We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false Self. We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.

My best writing has always been in journals.

We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.

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.

For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one's own contingent self, cannot exist where there is no contingent self to which anything can be attributed.

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

For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air.

All theology is a kind of birthday
Each one who is born
Comes into the world as a question
For which old answers
Are not sufficient.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly
themselves.

How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all.

On Pride: This sickness is most dangerous when it succeeds in looking like humility. When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless.

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

Love triumphs, at least in this life, not by eliminating evil once for all, but by resisting and overcoming it anew every day.

To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything.

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.

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.

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

The fruitfulness of our lives depends in large measure in our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own work. The man who completely trusts his own estimate of himself is doomed to sterility.

The grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.

This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality, consists not in getting rid of the self but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first.

Modern man believes he is fruitful and productive when his ego is aggressively affirmed, when he is visibly active, and when his action produces obvious results.

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

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.

Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.

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

You are certainly one of the joys of life for all who have ever come within a mile of you.

Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.

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

When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children.

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.

Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.

If we examine ourselves carefully we shall see most of us have an enormous amount of unfinished business...We have to be free so that we can just step across the line and that's it. That is what real freedom is.

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

If you have love you will do all things well.

Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.

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

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

O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't.

Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.

How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me?

The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer.

Let me rest in Your will and be silent. Then the light of Your joy will warm my life. Its fire will burn in my heart and shine for Your glory. This is what I live for. Amen, amen.

But precisely this illusion that everything is "clear" is what is blinding us all. It is a serious temptation, and it is a subtle form of pride and worldly love of power and revenge.

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

If we seek paradise outside ourselves, we cannot have paradise in our hearts.

I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery.

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.

It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers.

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?

Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God: for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice and mediocrity and materialism and selfishness that have chilled his faith.

Ash Wednesday is full of joy...The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust.

True happiness is found in unselfish Love, A love which increases in proportion as it is shared.

The sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.

If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him.

We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!

I shall lead you through the loneliness, the solitude you will not understand; but it is my shortcut to your soul.

The meaning of life is found in openness to being and "being present" in full awareness.

The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence -- it is unshakeable.

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.

You are made in the image of what you desire.