Top 500 Thomas Merton Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

303. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

305. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

326. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

335. “As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

337. “The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.”

— Thomas Merton

338. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

340. “We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation.”

— Thomas Merton

341. “A gentle sense of humor will be alert to detect anything that savors of a pious ‘act’ on the part of the penitent.”

— Thomas Merton

342. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

344. “As long as I am content to know that He is infinitely greater than I, and that I cannot know Him unless He shows himself to me, I will have Peace, and He will be near me and in me, and I will rest in Him.”

— Thomas Merton

345. “Love is not a mere emotion or sentiment. It is the lucid and ardent responses of the whole person to a value that is revealed to him as perfect.”

— Thomas Merton

346. “Many times it was like that. And in a sense, this terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it. We will to separate ourselves from that love. We reject it entirely and absolutely, and will not acknowledge it, simply because it does not please us to be loved.”

— Thomas Merton

347. “He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas.”

— Thomas Merton

348. “We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!”

— Thomas Merton

349. “It is my belief, that we should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in that part of humanity that is most remote from our own.”

— Thomas Merton

350. “To live in communion, in genuine dialogue with others is absolutely necessary if man is to remain human. But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a man in the worst way, separates him from reality in a way that is almost painless.”

— Thomas Merton