Thomas Merton Quotes
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201. “We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to “like” one another.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

206. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

209. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

221. “We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.”

— Thomas Merton

222. “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

223. “I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.”

— Thomas Merton

224. “The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary every day routine.”

— Thomas Merton

225. “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.”

— Thomas Merton

226. “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

227. “The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done.”

— Thomas Merton

228. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

230. “The only influence that can really upset the injustice and iniquity of men is the power that breathes in the Christian tradition, renewing our participation in the Life that is the Light of men.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

233. “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

234. “Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.”

— Thomas Merton

235. “Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good.”

— Thomas Merton

236. “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

237. “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

238. “One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

241. “This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.”

— Thomas Merton

242. “Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.”

— Thomas Merton

243. “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

244. “Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.”

— Thomas Merton

245. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

247. “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

248. “For although God is right with us and in us and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find him.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

250. “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