Top 500 Thomas Merton Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Laziness and cowardice are two of the greatest enemies of the spiritual life.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

203. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

206. “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

207. “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

208. “The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places.”

— Thomas Merton

209. “They were in the world and not of it – not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.”

— Thomas Merton

210. “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

211. “Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.”

— Thomas Merton

212. “Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life.”

— Thomas Merton

213. “A contemplative is not one who takes his prayer seriously, but one who takes God seriously, who is famished for truth, who seeks to live in generous simplicity, in the spirit. An ardent and sincere humility is the best protection for his life of prayer.”

— Thomas Merton

214. “Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all others.”

— Thomas Merton

215. “Duty does not have to be dull. Love can make it beautiful and fill it with life.”

— Thomas Merton

216. “A Christian is committed to the belief that Love and Mercy are the most powerful forces on earth.”

— Thomas Merton

217. “Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, the perfection of His love.”

— Thomas Merton

218. “We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”

— Thomas Merton

219. “Everything that happens to the poor, the meek, the desolate, the mourners, the despised, happens to Christ.”

— Thomas Merton

220. “Love is an intensification of life.”

— Thomas Merton

221. “The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive of perception.”

— Thomas Merton

222. “He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.”

— Thomas Merton

223. “Love is a special way of being alive.”

— Thomas Merton

224. “We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to “like” one another.”

— Thomas Merton

225. “Free will is not given to us merely as a firework to be shot off into the air. There are some men who seem to think their acts are freer in proportion as they are without purpose, as if a rational purpose imposed some kind of limitation upon us. That is like saying that one is richer if he throws money out the window than if he spends it.”

— Thomas Merton

226. “The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68.”

— Thomas Merton

227. “Tu qui sedes in tenebris spe tua gaude: orta stella matutina, sol non tardabit.”

— Thomas Merton

228. “It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

230. “The things I thought were so important – because of the effort I put into them – have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.”

— Thomas Merton

231. “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

232. “The humble person receives praise the way a clean window takes the light of the sun. The truer and more intense the light is, the less you see of the glass.”

— Thomas Merton

233. “THE most dangerous man in the world is the contemplative who is guided by nobody. He trusts his own visions. He obeys the attractions of an interior voice but will not listen to other men. He identifies the will of God with anything that makes him feel, within his own heart, a big, warm, sweet interior glow. The sweeter and the warmer the feeling is the more he is convinced of his own infallibility.”

— Thomas Merton

234. “Every moment and every event of everyman’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men.”

— Thomas Merton

235. “The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.”

— Thomas Merton

236. “No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.”

— Thomas Merton

237. “It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes.”

— Thomas Merton

238. “What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.”

— Thomas Merton

239. “One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us.”

— Thomas Merton

240. “What we have to be is what we are.”

— Thomas Merton

241. “The eyes of the saint make all beauty holy and the hands of the saint consecrate everything they touch to the glory of God, and the saint is never offended by anything and judges no man’s sin because he does not know sin. He knows the mercy of God. He knows that his own mission on earth is to bring that mercy to all men. W.”

— Thomas Merton

242. “I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is.”

— Thomas Merton

243. “It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not what he ought to be. If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we do away with him altogether.”

— Thomas Merton

244. “By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.”

— Thomas Merton

245. “Hence monastic prayer, especially meditation and contemplative prayer, is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him whom we have found, who loves us, who is near to us, who comes to us to draw us to himself.”

— Thomas Merton

246. “If you want to identify me,” he says to the British officers who are questioning him, “ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person.” page 25 in the book called, “The Man in the Sycamore Tree by Edward Rice.”

— Thomas Merton

247. “If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him.”

— Thomas Merton

248. “The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God’s mercy to me.”

— Thomas Merton

249. “Modern man believes he is fruitful and productive when his ego is aggressively affirmed, when he is visibly active, and when his action produces obvious results.”

— Thomas Merton

250. “The biggest disease in North America is busyness.”

— Thomas Merton