Top 500 Thomas Merton Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

303. “The deepest need of our darkness is to comprehend the light which shines in the midst of it.”

— Thomas Merton

304. “If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.”

— Thomas Merton

305. “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

306. “Stop thinking and start looking.”

— Thomas Merton

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

312. “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

313. “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

314. “A saint is not someone who is good but someone who experiences the goodness of God.”

— Thomas Merton

315. “In the spiritual life there is no such thing as an indifference to love or hate.”

— Thomas Merton

316. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

318. “The only unhappiness is not to love God.”

— Thomas Merton

319. “Love is perfect in proportion to it’s freedom.”

— Thomas Merton

320. “The art of our time, sacred art included, will necessarily be characterized by a certain poverty, grimness and roughness which correspond to the violent realities of a cruel age.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

322. “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

323. “As long as we secretly adore ourselves, our own deficiencies will remain to torture us with an apparent defilement. But if we live for others, we will gradually discover that no one expects us to be “as gods.” We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us.”

— Thomas Merton

324. “To place your trust in visible things is to live in despair.”

— Thomas Merton

325. “In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

327. “When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago.”

— Thomas Merton

328. “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

329. “It is when we insist most firmly on everyone else being “reasonable” that we become ourselves, unreasonable.”

— Thomas Merton

330. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

Featured in: Real Quotes

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis but first of all by living.”

— Thomas Merton

337. “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

338. “Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.”

— Thomas Merton

339. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

341. “If we do not respond to human affection we cannot be loved by God in the way in which He has willed to love us – with the Heart of the Man, Jesus Who is God, the Son of God, and the anointed Christ.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

343. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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