Top 80 Thomas Keating Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “God’s first language is Silence. Everything else is a translation.”

— Thomas Keating

2. “The root of prayer is interior silence.”

— Thomas Keating

3. “Silence is God’s language, and it’s a very difficult language to learn.”

— Thomas Keating

4. “The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separated from God.”

— Thomas Keating

5. “If one completes the journey to one’s own heart, one will find oneself in the heart of everyone else.”

— Thomas Keating

6. “God will bring people and events into our lives, and whatever we may think about them, they are designed for the evolution of His life in us.”

— Thomas Keating

7. “Centering prayer is a training in letting go.”

— Thomas Keating

8. “In centering prayer, the sacred word is not the object of the attention but rather the expression of the intention of the will.”

— Thomas Keating

9. “If you accept the belief that baptism incorporates us in the mystical body of Christ, into the divine DNA, then you might say that the Holy Spirit is present in each of us, and thus we have the capacity for the fullness of redemption, of transformation.”

— Thomas Keating

10. “In human relationships, as mutual love deepens, there comes a time when two friends convey their exchanges without words. They can sit in silence sharing an experience or simply enjoying each other’s presence without saying anything.”

— Thomas Keating

11. “To see everything in God and to see God in everything normally takes a lifetime of practice.”

— Thomas Keating

12. “While doing centering prayer, the practice is to let go of any thought or perception. The priority is to be as silent as possible and when that is not possible to let the noise of the thoughts be the sacred symbol for a while, without analyzing them.”

— Thomas Keating

13. “It is essential for world peace that the world religions make peace with each other. If they don’t, we can hardly expect the nations of the world to lay down their arms.”

— Thomas Keating

14. “We rarely think of the air we breathe, yet it is in us and around us all the time. In similar fashion, the presence of God penetrates us, is all around us, is always embracing us.”

— Thomas Keating

15. “The acceptance of all that God has given us and the willingness to let it go – to give it back to him at a moment’s notice – that’s true human freedom.”

— Thomas Keating

16. “Humility is the forgetfulness of self.”

— Thomas Keating

17. “For human beings, the most daunting challenge is to become fully human. For to become fully human is to become fully divine.”

— Thomas Keating

18. “Contemplative prayer is a deepening of faith that moves beyond thoughts and concepts. One just listens to God, open and receptive to the divine presence in one’s inmost being as its source. One listens not with a view to hearing something, but with a view to becoming aware of the obstacles to one’s friendship with God.”

— Thomas Keating

19. “All of us have been through the process of being born and entering this world with three essential biological needs: security and survival, power and control, affection and esteem.”

— Thomas Keating

20. “Gifts of the Holy Spirit grow in direct proportion to the depth and sincerity of our love.”

— Thomas Keating

21. “The capacity for emotional sobriety belongs to everybody in the human family and leads to a fully human response to the adventure and goodness of the gift of human life.”

— Thomas Keating

22. “Lent is a time to renew wherever we are in that process that I call the divine therapy. It’s a time to look what our instinctual needs are, look at what the dynamics of our unconscious are.”

— Thomas Keating

23. “The word “emptiness” for example, is a very important word both in Christianity and in Buddhism. It has shades of meaning however, that are different in the respective traditions.”

— Thomas Keating

24. “To live in the presence of God on a continuous basis can become a kind of fourth dimension to our three-dimensional world, forming an invisible but real background to everything that we do or that happens in our lives.”

— Thomas Keating

25. “The spiritual journey can be a lonely road in the beginning. Later God will give us new friends. God does not take anything away except to give us something better.”

— Thomas Keating

26. “Every time you have a major breakthrough in self-knowledge, and see the way the divine works within your own psyche, external events, and interior experiences of the divine, you are transformed in some degree.”

— Thomas Keating

27. “By deepening the spiritual dialogue between the spiritual traditions of the various religions in a spirit of friendship, one begins to understand just what the classical terms of the various spiritual traditions really mean.”

— Thomas Keating

28. “One of the great purposes of religion itself is being hindered by an exclusive-ism that doesn’t take into account the common elements and values that we actually share.”

— Thomas Keating

29. “Einstein believed that science was directed toward discovering God’s thoughts. Quantum physics itself is a kind of spirituality insofar as it is always looking farther into the unknown to see what is beyond the known. It is a search for ultimate reality.”

— Thomas Keating

30. “In the Christian perspective, the love of God and of all other human beings invites us to share and enjoy not just the best of the human potential as it evolves, but participation in the divine life itself.”

— Thomas Keating

31. “Perhaps the shortest and most powerful prayer in human language is help.”

— Thomas Keating

32. “We may experience moments of profound inner peace, a sense of oneness with nature, or a sense of something that is more important that we’re not reaching by the usual goals of human society. Perhaps we could say there’s a common heart to all the religions.”

— Thomas Keating

33. “The complementary movement towards divine love is growth in humility which is the acceptence of the reality about ourselves, our own weakness and limitations.”

— Thomas Keating

34. “Union with God is really possible. Unity with God I presume, is what is meant by Heaven, but that too is available in this life for the humble of heart.”

— Thomas Keating

35. “Psychotherapy is what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, he searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed – the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds.”

— Thomas Keating

36. “Divine life is basically the inner freedom to choose the right and the good spontaneously.”

— Thomas Keating

37. “Over time we are able to undermine habitual modes of thinking formed by our self-made self in early childhood, which tries to squeeze happiness from the gratification of our desires for the symbols in our culture of survival and security, power and control, and affection and esteem.”

— Thomas Keating

38. “God seems willing to act as the most sublime psychologist, psychotherapist, or even psychiatrist if we are willing.”

— Thomas Keating

39. “The false self is deeply entrenched. You can change your name and address, religion, country, and clothes. But as long as you don’t ask it to change, the false self simply adjusts to the new environment. For example, instead of drinking your friends under the table as a significant sign of self-worth and esteem, if you enter a monastery, as I did, fasting the other monks under the table could become your new path to glory.”

— Thomas Keating

40. “Technology isn’t fulfilling its promise of unlimited progress and solving every problem through technology. With the Enlightenment and its aftermath, there already was a general loss of confidence in the Western religions.”

— Thomas Keating

41. “God is a tremendous supporter of creation, especially of all living beings.”

— Thomas Keating

42. “As the years go by, I find myself experiencing God’s extraordinary concern, consideration, healing, and what I call in my books, the divine therapy.”

— Thomas Keating

43. “Finding out what particular insights mean to people in other traditions enables us not only to respect but to love the wisdom of other religions.”

— Thomas Keating

44. “What I really wanted was to fall in love with God. It’s amazing what obstacles there are within us, or at least in me, that seem to slow this process.”

— Thomas Keating

45. “Your relationship with God, others, yourself, and all creation keeps changing for the better. Most of the world’s religions have developed maps to describe this process.”

— Thomas Keating

46. “Just by the very nature of our birth, we are on the spiritual journey.”

— Thomas Keating

47. “If you want to be free, he suggests, if you want to heal your relationship with God, with others and yourself, enter your inner room – the office, where the Divine Therapy takes place. Close the door so you don’t run away. Quiet your interior dialogue so that you can listen to what the Spirit is saying to you.”

— Thomas Keating

48. “Religions have a special responsibility to encourage and inspire people to love planet earth, which as far as we know, is the only place in the cosmos that works in such a harmonious way that it can support intelligent life.”

— Thomas Keating

49. “God is available through many sources besides the religious quest. I don’t mean to imply that psychology replaces the work of religion, but it seems to me that it greatly supports religion and brings a certain clarity to areas of the human condition, especially the discovery of the unconscious.”

— Thomas Keating

50. “In the world that lies ahead, religious pluralism is going to penetrate all cultures. How we live together with different points of view is going to become more and more important. I don’t know whether we can make progress in such a project without a contemplative practice that alerts us to our own biases, prejudices, and self-centered programs for happiness, especially when they trample on other people’s rights and needs.”

— Thomas Keating