Top 500 Thomas Merton Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

153. “Humble people can do great things with uncommon perfection because they are no longer concerned about their own interests and their own reputation, and therefore they no longer need to waste their efforts in defending them.”

— Thomas Merton

154. “Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found.”

— Thomas Merton

155. “The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God’s will and his grace.”

— Thomas Merton

156. “God makes us ask ourselves questions most often when He intends to resolve them. He gives us needs that He alone can satisfy, and awakens capacities that He means to fulfill. Any perplexity is liable to be a spiritual gestation, leading to a new birth and a mystical regeneration.”

— Thomas Merton

157. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

158. “The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living.”

— Thomas Merton

159. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

160. “Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves.”

— Thomas Merton

161. “To be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.”

— Thomas Merton

162. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

163. “You pray best when the mirror of your soul is empty of every image except the Image of the Invisible Father.”

— Thomas Merton

164. “The goal of fasting is inner unity.”

— Thomas Merton

165. “Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible.”

— Thomas Merton

166. “It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God.”

— Thomas Merton

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

170. “A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy.”

— Thomas Merton

171. “Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

173. “We cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great.”

— Thomas Merton

174. “Solitude is so necessary both for society and for the individual that when society fails to provide sufficient solitude to develop the inner life of the persons who compose it, they rebel and seek false solitudes.”

— Thomas Merton

175. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

176. “The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe.”

— Thomas Merton

177. “The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.”

— Thomas Merton

178. “To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God.”

— Thomas Merton

179. “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

180. “Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are.”

— Thomas Merton

181. “Thinking prevents the unconscious from speaking.”

— Thomas Merton

182. “Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being’s awareness of itself in us.”

— Thomas Merton

183. “The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.”

— Thomas Merton

184. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

185. “Charity is without fear: having given all that it has, it has nothing left to lose.”

— Thomas Merton

186. “It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.”

— Thomas Merton

187. “The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical.”

— Thomas Merton

188. “If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is “just glass.””

— Thomas Merton

189. “AN ELDER was asked by a certain soldier if God would forgive a sinner. And he said to him: Tell me, beloved, if your cloak is torn, will you throw it away? The soldier replied and said: No. I will mend it and put it back on. The elder said to him: If you take care of your cloak, will God not be merciful to His own image?”

— Thomas Merton

190. “Lovely morning! How lovely life can be!”

— Thomas Merton

191. “The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.”

— Thomas Merton

192. “It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.”

— Thomas Merton

193. “We must slow down to a human tempo and we’ll begin to have time to listen.”

— Thomas Merton

194. “We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it.”

— Thomas Merton

195. “What I do is live, how I pray is breathe, what I wear is pants.”

— Thomas Merton

196. “A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions, is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of “choice” when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses.”

— Thomas Merton

197. “How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man’s city?”

— Thomas Merton

198. “Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.”

— Thomas Merton

199. “How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived.”

— Thomas Merton

200. “Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.”

— Thomas Merton