Top 500 Thomas Merton Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and joy you have not yet begun to live.”

— Thomas Merton

52. “The gift of love is the gift of the power and capacity to love, and therefore, to give love with full effect is also to receive it. So love can only be kept by being given away, and it can only be given perfectly when it is also received.”

— Thomas Merton

53. “The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

55. “One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.”

— Thomas Merton

56. “Love is the door to eternity.”

— Thomas Merton

57. “Take more time, cover less ground.”

— Thomas Merton

58. “Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.”

— Thomas Merton

59. “My God, I pray better to you by breathing. I pray better to you by walking than by talking.”

— Thomas Merton

60. “True encounter with Christ liberates something within us, a power we did not know we had, a capacity to grow and change.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

62. “The gate of heaven is everywhere.”

— Thomas Merton

63. “We do not exist for ourselves.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

65. “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?”

— Thomas Merton

66. “One has to be alone, under the sky, Before everything falls into place and one finds his or her own place in the midst of it all. We have to have the humility to realize ourselves as part of nature.”

— Thomas Merton

67. “Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

69. “Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

71. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

72. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

73. “You are made in the image of what you desire.”

— Thomas Merton

74. “A faith that is afraid of other people is not faith at all.”

— Thomas Merton

75. “Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything.”

— Thomas Merton

76. “If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest God, does not bless our work.”

— Thomas Merton

77. “The great thing, and the only thing, is to adore and praise GOD.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

80. “My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

82. “Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another.”

— Thomas Merton

83. “That is God’s call to us – simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.”

— Thomas Merton

84. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

85. “To hope is to risk frustration. Make up your mind to risk frustration.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

87. “Our real journey in life is interior.”

— Thomas Merton

88. “Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God.”

— Thomas Merton

89. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

90. “Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.”

— Thomas Merton

91. “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

92. “Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

94. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

95. “I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

— Thomas Merton

96. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

97. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

98. “Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

100. “When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable.”

— Thomas Merton