Top 500 Thomas Merton Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Lovely morning! How lovely life can be!”

— Thomas Merton

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

214. “Laziness and cowardice are two of the greatest enemies of the spiritual life.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

216. “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

217. “The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

219. “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

220. “How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me?”

— Thomas Merton

221. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

223. “Those who are not grateful soon begin to complain of everything.”

— Thomas Merton

224. “If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.”

— Thomas Merton

225. “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

226. “The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.”

— Thomas Merton

227. “Contemplation is the loving sense of this life, this presence and this eternity.”

— Thomas Merton

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

233. “We stumble and fall constantly, even when we are most enlightened.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

235. “A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

237. “Love is our true destiny.”

— Thomas Merton

238. “In our present attitude the natural world remains a commodity to be bought and sold, not a sacred reality to be venerated.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

240. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

242. “God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of Himself.”

— Thomas Merton

243. “Love is an intensification of life.”

— Thomas Merton

244. “The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to him.”

— Thomas Merton

245. “As soon as you are really alone you are with God.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

247. “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve.”

— Thomas Merton

248. “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

249. “The time will come when they will sell you even your rain.”

— Thomas Merton

250. “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