Top 500 Thomas Merton Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “The things that we love tell us what we are.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

257. “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

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258. “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

259. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

262. “Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

271. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words. It is beyond speech. It is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity, but we discover an old unity. My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be, is what we are.”

— Thomas Merton

284. “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

285. “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

286. “In the end, it’s the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

288. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

291. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

293. “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

294. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

296. “Every moment and every event of every man’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. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity, and love.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

298. “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

299. “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

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

— Thomas Merton