Top 500 Thomas Merton Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

308. “True simplicity implies love and trust – it does not expect to be derided and rejected, any more than it expects to be admired and praised.”

— Thomas Merton

309. “There is a subtle but inescapable connection between the “sacred” attitude and the acceptance of one’s in most self.”

— Thomas Merton

310. “The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself.”

— Thomas Merton

311. “As soon as one is conscious of the presence of the Master, one must, in all passivity, abandon the work to Him.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

313. “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

314. “The reality of a person is a deep and hidden thing, buried not only in the invisible recesses of man’s own metaphysical secrecy but in the secrecy of God Himself.”

— Thomas Merton

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

318. “We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.”

— Thomas Merton

319. “The things that we love tell us what we are.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

321. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

323. “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

324. “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

325. “Charity must teach us that friendship is a holy thing, and that it is neither charitable nor holy to base our friendship on falsehood. We can be, in some sense, friends to all men because there is no man on earth with whom we do not have something in common. But it would be false to treat too many men as intimate friends. It is not possible to be intimate with more than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common.”

— Thomas Merton

326. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

338. “There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.”

— Thomas Merton

339. “My chief care should not be to find pleasure or success, health or life or money or rest or even things like virtue and wisdom – still less their opposites, pain, failure, sickness, death. But in all that happens, my one desire and my one joy should be to know: “Here is the thing that God has willed for me. In this His love is found, and in accepting this I can give back His love to Him and give myself with it to Him. For in giving myself I shall find Him and He is life everlasting.” By.”

— Thomas Merton

340. “A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass.”

— Thomas Merton

341. “The evil in the world is all of our own making, and it proceeds entirely from our ruthless, senseless, wasteful, destructive, and suicidal neglect of our own being.”

— Thomas Merton

342. “There are days when I am convinced that Heaven starts already, now, in this ordinary life just as it is, in all its incompleteness, yet, this is where Heaven starts... see within yourself, if you can find it. I walked through the field in front of the house, lots of swallows flying, everywhere! Some very near me... it was magical. “We are already one, yet we know it not.”

— Thomas Merton

343. “People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular- and too lazy to think of anything better.”

— Thomas Merton

344. “The life of the soul is not knowledge, it is love, since love is the act of the supreme faculty, the will, by which man is formally united to the final end of all his strivings – by which man becomes one with God.”

— Thomas Merton

345. “One opens the inner doors of one’s heart to the infinite silences of the Spirit, out of whose abysses love wells up without fail and gives itself to all.”

— Thomas Merton

346. “But precisely this illusion that everything is “clear” is what is blinding us all. It is a serious temptation, and it is a subtle form of pride and worldly love of power and revenge.”

— Thomas Merton

347. “Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.”

— Thomas Merton

348. “Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.”

— Thomas Merton

349. “ONE of the paradoxes of the mystical life is this: that a man cannot enter into the deepest center of himself and pass through that center into God, unless he is able to pass entirely out of himself and empty himself and give himself to other people in the purity of a selfless love.”

— Thomas Merton

350. “In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for ‘finding himself.’ If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.”

— Thomas Merton