Top 500 Thomas Merton Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

253. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “If we want to be spiritual, then, let us first of all live our lives. Let us not fear the responsibilities and the inevitable distractions of the work appointed for us by the will of God.”

— Thomas Merton

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

266. “Providence, that is the love of God, is very wise in turning away from the self-will of men, and in having nothing to do with them, and leaving them to their own devices, as long as they are intent on governing themselves, to show them to what depths of futility and sorrow their own helplessness is capable of dragging them. And.”

— Thomas Merton

267. “If you have never had any distractions you don’t know how to pray.”

— Thomas Merton

268. “The Mass is a memorial of Christ’s sacrifice, not in the sense of an exterior commemoration, but as a living and supremely efficacious re-presentation of that sacrifice, pouring out into our hearts the redemptive power of the Cross and the grace of the resurrection, which enables us to live in God.”

— Thomas Merton

269. “The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.”

— Thomas Merton

270. “To worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

272. “You are certainly one of the joys of life for all who have ever come within a mile of you.”

— Thomas Merton

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

277. “If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology. For religion goes beyond words and actions, and attains to the ultimate Truth only in silence and Love.”

— Thomas Merton

278. “Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38.”

— Thomas Merton

279. “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

280. “God Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true self.”

— Thomas Merton

281. “You can now find the most ardent Christians lined up in the most ridiculous, regressive, irrational parades. If they were concerned only with flying saucers and conversations with the departed it would not be so bad: but they are also deeply involved in racism, in quasi-Fascist nationalism, in every shade of fanatical hate cult, and in every semilunatic pressure group.”

— Thomas Merton

282. “It would be a sin to place any limit upon our hope in God. We must love Him without measure. All sin is rooted in the failure of love. All sin is a withdrawal of love from God, in order to love something else.”

— Thomas Merton

283. “Without courage we can never attain to true simplicity. Cowardice keeps us “double minded” – hesitating between the world and God.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

285. “The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence – it is unshakeable.”

— Thomas Merton

286. “No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.”

— Thomas Merton

287. “I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.”

— Thomas Merton

288. “Life is not accomplishing some special work but attaining to a degree of consciousness and inner freedom which is beyond all works and attainments.”

— Thomas Merton

289. “When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

291. “Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

293. “We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us.”

— Thomas Merton

294. “October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.”

— Thomas Merton

295. “Nevertheless, every day love corners me somewhere and surrounds me with peace without my having to look very far or very hard or do anything special. God.”

— Thomas Merton

296. “Stop thinking and start looking.”

— Thomas Merton

297. “Love is our true destiny.”

— Thomas Merton

298. “But there is always a danger that the priest qualified to seriously direct religious will be overwhelmed by the demand for his services. His first duty, if he wants to be an effective director, is to see to his own interior life and take time for prayer and meditation, since he will never be able to give to others what he does not possess himself.”

— Thomas Merton

299. “Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton