Thomas Merton Quotes
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301. “A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

312. “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

313. “Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.”

— Thomas Merton

314. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

320. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “O God, my God, the night has values that the day never dreamed of.”

— Thomas Merton

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.”

— Thomas Merton

330. “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

331. “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

332. “We cannot find Him unless we know we need Him. We forget this need when we take a self-sufficient pleasure in our own good works. The poor and helpless are the first to find Him, Who came to seek and to save that which was lost.”

— Thomas Merton

333. “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

334. “To love blindly is to love selfishly, because the goal of such love is not the real advantage of the beloved but only the exercise of love in our own souls.”

— Thomas Merton

335. “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

336. “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

337. “The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

342. “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

343. “They were in the world and not of it – not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.”

— Thomas Merton

344. “A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book.”

— Thomas Merton

345. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

347. “Because of their enmity you will be left alone. They will cast you out and forsake you.”

— Thomas Merton

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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