Top 500 Thomas Merton Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “If you have love you will do all things well.”

— Thomas Merton

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

160. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

163. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

168. “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

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

— 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 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

173. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

175. “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

176. “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

177. “Thinking prevents the unconscious from speaking.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

179. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

188. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

191. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

194. “The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.”

— Thomas Merton

195. “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.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

197. “To Serve the God of Love one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to love in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one’s neighbor.”

— Thomas Merton

198. “The logic of the poet – that is, the logic of language or the experience itself – develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

200. “To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair.”

— Thomas Merton