Top 500 Thomas Merton Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “My true personality will be fulfilled in the Mystical Christ in this one way above all, that through me, Christ and His Spirit will be able to love you and all men and God the Father in a way that would be possible in no one else. Love.”

— Thomas Merton

402. “His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept.”

— Thomas Merton

403. “Solitude Is Not Separation SOME men have perhaps become hermits with the thought that sanctity could only be attained by escape from other men. But the only justification for a life of deliberate solitude is the conviction that it will help you to love not only God but also other men. If you go into the desert merely to get away from people you dislike, you will find neither peace nor solitude; you will only isolate yourself with a tribe of devils.”

— Thomas Merton

404. “The true spiritual life is a life neither of dionysian orgy nor of apollonian clarity: it transcends both. It is a life of wisdom, a life of sophianic love. In Sophia, the highest wisdom-principle, all the greatness and majesty of the unknown that is in God and all that is rich and maternal in His creation are united inseparably, as paternal and maternal principles, the uncreated Father and created Mother-Wisdom.”

— Thomas Merton

405. “Spread abroad the name of Jesus in humility and with a meek heart; show him your feebleness, and he will become your strength.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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408. “To become attached to the experience of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love.”

— Thomas Merton

409. “We cannot possess the truth fully until it has entered into the very substance of our life by good habits, and by a certain perfection of moral activity.”

— Thomas Merton

410. “Infinite sharing is the law of God s inner life.”

— Thomas Merton

411. “You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer.”

— Thomas Merton

412. “The arguments of religious men are so often insincere, and their insincerity is proportionate to their anger. Why do we get angry about what we believe? Because we do not really believe it. Or else what we pretend to be defending as the “truth” is really our own self-esteem. A man of sincerity is less interested in defending the truth than in stating it clearly, for he thinks that if the truth be clearly seen it can very well take care of itself.”

— Thomas Merton

413. “And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.”

— Thomas Merton

414. “The beginning of the fight against hatred, the basic Christian answer to hatred, is not the commandment to love, but what must necessarily come before in order to make the commandment bearable and comprehensible. It is a prior commandment, to believe. The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved. The faith that one is loved by God. That faith that one is loved by God although unworthy – or, rather, irrespective of one’s worth!”

— Thomas Merton

415. “Place no hope in the feeling of assurance, in spiritual comfort. You may well have to get along without this.”

— Thomas Merton

416. “I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and happening, and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it.”

— Thomas Merton

417. “Oh, America, how I began to love your country! What miles of silences God has made in you for contemplation! If only people realized what all your mountains and forests are really for!”

— Thomas Merton

418. “A daydream is an evasion.”

— Thomas Merton

419. “I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to.”

— Thomas Merton

420. “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. Love, then, must.”

— Thomas Merton

421. “IT is not that someone else is preventing you from living happily; you yourself do not know what you want. Rather than admit this, you pretend that someone is keeping you from exercising your liberty. Who is this? It is you yourself.”

— Thomas Merton

422. “The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.”

— Thomas Merton

423. “Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.”

— Thomas Merton

424. “Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered...”

— Thomas Merton

425. “May God prevent us from becoming “right-thinking men”-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.”

— Thomas Merton

426. “A “FAITH” that merely confirms us in opinionatedness and self-complacency may well be an expression of theological doubt. True faith is never merely a source of spiritual comfort. It may indeed bring peace, but before it does so it must involve us in struggle. A “faith” that avoids this struggle is really a temptation against true faith.”

— Thomas Merton

427. “The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out.”

— Thomas Merton

428. “If what most people take for granted were really true – if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now. If.”

— Thomas Merton

429. “It is not speaking that breaks our silence, but the anxiety to be heard. The words of the proud man impose silence on all others, so that he alone may be heard. The humble man speaks only in order to be spoken to.”

— Thomas Merton

430. “One bird sits still Watching the work of God:.”

— Thomas Merton

431. “There is a dark force for destruction within us, which someone has called the “death instinct.” It is a terribly powerful thing, this force generated by our own frustrated self-love battling with itself. It is the power of a self-love that has turned into self-hatred and which, in adoring itself, adores the monster by which it is consumed.”

— Thomas Merton

432. “Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.”

— Thomas Merton

433. “We assume that others are receiving the kind of appreciation we want for ourselves, and we proceed on the assumption that since we are not loveable as we are, we must become lovable under false pretenses, as if we were something better than we are.”

— Thomas Merton

434. “Contemplation is the awareness and realization, even in some sense experience, of what each Christian obscurely believes: “It is now no longer I that live but Christ lives in me.” Hence.”

— Thomas Merton

435. “A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.”

— Thomas Merton

436. “Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk’s life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.”

— Thomas Merton

437. “All of this is mystification. The city itself lives on its own myth. Instead of waking up and silently existing, the city people prefer a stubborn and fabricated dream; they do not care to be a part of the night, or to be merely of the world. They have constructed a world outside the world, against the world, a world of mechanical fictions which contemn nature and seek only to use it up, thus preventing it from renewing itself and man.”

— Thomas Merton

438. “Pardon all runners, All speechless, alien winds, All mad waters. Pardon their impulses, Their wild attitudes, Their young flights, their reticence. When a message has no clothes on How can it be spoken.”

— Thomas Merton

439. “A man becomes a solitary at the moment when, no matter what may be his external surroundings, he is suddenly aware of his own inalienable solitude and sees that he will never be anything but solitary.”

— Thomas Merton

440. “To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason.”

— Thomas Merton

441. “Thank God! I am only another member of the human race, like all the rest of them... As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

— Thomas Merton

442. “Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it.”

— Thomas Merton

443. “To be truly Catholic is not merely to be correct according to an abstractly universal standard of truth, but also and above all to be able to enter into the problems and the joys of all, to understand all, to be all things to all.”

— Thomas Merton

444. “The problem today is that there are no deserts, only dude ranches.”

— Thomas Merton

445. “There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics.”

— Thomas Merton

446. “This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under hope in the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly.”

— Thomas Merton

447. “And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within, and from the habitual union of their souls with God in deep faith and charity.”

— Thomas Merton

448. “Monastic prayer begins not so much with “considerations” as with a “return to the heart,” finding one’s deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being.”

— Thomas Merton

449. “For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness.”

— Thomas Merton

450. “My best writing has always been in journals.”

— Thomas Merton