Top 500 Thomas Merton Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions.”

— Thomas Merton

152. “For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God’s will, to be what God wants us to be.”

— Thomas Merton

153. “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

154. “This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality, consists not in getting rid of the self but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first.”

— Thomas Merton

155. “For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point vierge between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs.”

— Thomas Merton

156. “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

157. “The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.”

— Thomas Merton

158. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

161. “Thinking prevents the unconscious from speaking.”

— Thomas Merton

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

167. “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

168. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “Love winter when the plant says nothing.”

— Thomas Merton

173. “A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.”

— Thomas Merton

174. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

176. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

185. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

187. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

189. “Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

191. “Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.”

— Thomas Merton

192. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

193. “The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

195. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

197. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

199. “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

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

— Thomas Merton