Thomas Merton Quotes
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251. “The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence – it is unshakeable.”

— Thomas Merton

252. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

261. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

263. “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

264. “Stop thinking and start looking.”

— Thomas Merton

265. “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

266. “What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night.”

— Thomas Merton

267. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

269. “It is here, in this poverty, that man regains the eternal being that once he was, now is and evermore shall be.”

— Thomas Merton

270. “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

271. “Love is an intensification of life.”

— Thomas Merton

272. “This time is given to me by God that I may live in it. It is not given to make something out of it, but given me to be stored away in eternity as my own.”

— Thomas Merton

273. “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

274. “Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love...”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

276. “The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of Christian thought has seriously impaired this capacity, which nonviolence must recover.”

— Thomas Merton

277. “And of course most non-Catholics imagine that the Church is immensely rich, and that all Catholic institutions make money hand over fist, and that all the money is stored away somewhere to buy gold and silver dishes for the Pope and cigars for the College of Cardinals.”

— Thomas Merton

278. “A letter arrives stamped with the slogan “The U. S. Army, key to peace.” No army is the key to peace, neither the U. S. Army nor the Soviet Army nor any other. No “great” nation has the key to anything but war. Power has nothing to do with peace. The more men build up military power, the more they violate peace and destroy it.”

— Thomas Merton

279. “Get warm any way you can, and love God and pray.”

— Thomas Merton

280. “In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question.”

— Thomas Merton

281. “Be still: There is no longer any need of comment. It was a lucky wind That blew away his halo with his cares, A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.”

— Thomas Merton

282. “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

283. “Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked.”

— Thomas Merton

284. “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

285. “O love-why can’t you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven’s sake, don’t.”

— Thomas Merton

286. “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

287. “There should be at least a room or some corner where no one will find you and disturb you or notice you.”

— Thomas Merton

288. “Let me rest in Your will and be silent. Then the light of Your joy will warm my life. Its fire will burn in my heart and shine for Your glory. This is what I live for. Amen, amen.”

— Thomas Merton

289. “No matter how ruined man and his world may seem to be, and no matter how terrible man’s despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning.”

— Thomas Merton

290. “The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.”

— Thomas Merton

291. “The man who lives in division is living in death. He cannot find himself because he is lost; he has ceased to be a reality. The person he believes himself to be is a bad dream.”

— Thomas Merton

292. “We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of others and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us.”

— Thomas Merton

293. “Stop asking yourself questions that have no meaning. Or if they have, you’ll find out when you need to – find out both the questions and the answers.”

— Thomas Merton

294. “When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children.”

— Thomas Merton

295. “Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

297. “Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.”

— Thomas Merton

298. “I am earth, earth My heart’s love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected.”

— Thomas Merton

299. “Violence is essentially wordless. and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton