Top 500 Thomas Merton Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.”

— Thomas Merton

452. “To be truly Catholic is not merely to be correct according to an abstractly universal standard of truth, but also and above all to be able to enter into the problems and the joys of all, to understand all, to be all things to all.”

— Thomas Merton

453. “The “spiritual life” is then the perfectly balanced life in which the body with its passions and instincts, the mind with its reasoning and its obedience to principle and the spirit with its passive illumination by the Light and Love of God form one complete man who is in God and with God and from God and for God. One man in whom God is all in all. One man in whom God carries out His own will without obstacle.”

— Thomas Merton

454. “The truly sacred attitude toward life is in no sense an escape from the sense of nothingness that assails us when we are left alone with ourselves.”

— Thomas Merton

455. “There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another’s solitude.”

— Thomas Merton

456. “How free you can become if you stop worrying about things that don’t concern you!”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

458. “When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago.”

— Thomas Merton

459. “It is when we insist most firmly on everyone else being “reasonable” that we become ourselves, unreasonable.”

— Thomas Merton

460. “Love not only prefers the good of another to my own, but it does not even compare the two.”

— Thomas Merton

461. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

462. “I don’t even need to know precisely what I am doing, except that I am acting for the love of God.”

— Thomas Merton

463. “Indeed, it is a kind of quintessence of pride to hate and fear even the kind and legitimate approval of those who love us! I mean, to resent it as a humiliating patronage.”

— Thomas Merton

464. “The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is in fact an intensification of life a completeness a fullness a wholeness of life.”

— Thomas Merton

465. “It can be said, without fear of error, that our meditation is as good as our faith.”

— Thomas Merton

466. “The climate of this prayer is, then, one of awareness, gratitude and a totally obedient love which seeks nothing but to please God.”

— Thomas Merton

467. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

468. “Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in the smoke of confabulation. There can be no peace on earth without the kind of inner change that brings man back to his “right mind.” p. 31.”

— Thomas Merton

469. “In the end, no one can seek God unless he has already begun to find him.”

— Thomas Merton

470. “Ultimately the only way that I can be myself is to become identified with Him in Whom is hidden the reason and fulfillment of my existence.”

— Thomas Merton

471. “The Hindus are not looking for us to send them men who will build schools and hospitals, although those things are good and useful in themselves – and perhaps very badly needed in India: they want to know if we have any saints to send them.”

— Thomas Merton

472. “I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within.”

— Thomas Merton

473. “We love the things we pretend to laugh at.”

— Thomas Merton

474. “Hope is proportionate to detachment. It brings our souls into the state of the most perfect detachment. In doing so, it restores all values by setting them in their right order. Hope empties our hands in order that we may work with them. It shows us that we have something to work for, and teaches us how to work for it.”

— Thomas Merton

475. “I must become convinced and penetrated by the realization that without my love for them they may perhaps not achieve the things God has willed for them. My.”

— Thomas Merton

476. “For our duties and our needs, in all the fundamental things for which we were created, come down in practice to the same thing.”

— Thomas Merton

477. “One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask.”

— Thomas Merton

478. “It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are.”

— Thomas Merton

479. “It is good for the soul to be in solitude for a great part of the time. But if it should seek solitude for its own comfort and consolation, it will have to endure more darkness and more anguish and more trial. Pure prayer only takes possession of our hearts for good when we no longer desire any special light or grace or consolation for ourselves, and pray without any thought of our own satisfaction.”

— Thomas Merton

480. “The thing that crushed me was that I had never learned to dance.”

— Thomas Merton

481. “The mercy of God demands to be known and recognized and set apart from everything else and praised and adored in joy.”

— Thomas Merton

482. “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, therefore, I do anything or think anything or say anything or know anything that is not purely for the love of God, it cannot give me peace, or rest, or fulfillment, or.”

— Thomas Merton

483. “But the pride of those who live as if they believed they were better than anyone else is rooted in a secret failure to believe in their own goodness.”

— Thomas Merton

484. “We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man’s reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole.”

— Thomas Merton

485. “I simply have no business being in love and playing around with a girl, however innocently... After all I am supposed to be a monk with a vow of chastity and though I have kept my vow – I wonder if I can keep it indefinitely and still play this gorgeous game!”

— Thomas Merton

486. “What is the good of religion without personal spiritual direction?”

— Thomas Merton

487. “As a matter of fact, it is often harder to manifest the good that is in us than the evil.”

— Thomas Merton

488. “Freedom is perfect when no other love can impede our desire to love God.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

490. “The distinctive characteristic of religious meditation is that it is a search for truth which springs from love and which seeks to possess the truth not only by knowledge but also by love.”

— Thomas Merton

491. “Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

493. “Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis but first of all by living.”

— Thomas Merton

494. “Heaven and earth come together in the Unbegun, And all is foolishness, all is unknown, all is like The lights of an idiot, all is without mind! To obey is to close the beak and fall into Unbeginning.”

— Thomas Merton

495. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

496. “A theology of love cannot be allowed merely to serve the interests of the rich and powerful, justifying their wars, their violence and their bombs, while exhorting the poor and underprivileged to practice patience, meekness, long-suffering and to solve their problems, if at all, nonviolently.”

— Thomas Merton

497. “And when I thought there was no God and no love and no mercy, you were leading me all the while into the midst of His love and His mercy and taking me, without my knowing anything about it, to the house that would hide me in the secret of His Face.”

— Thomas Merton

498. “The proud man loves his own illusion and self-sufficiency. The spiritually poor man loves his very insufficiency.”

— Thomas Merton

499. “The soul of man, left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness. It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside and above itself. But when the light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in it.”

— Thomas Merton

500. “By “prayer of the heart” we seek God himself present in the depths of our being and meet him there by invoking the name of Jesus in faith, wonder and love.”

— Thomas Merton