Thomas Merton Quotes
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401. “The problem today is that there are no deserts, only dude ranches.”

— Thomas Merton

402. “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

403. “We never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggression and hypocrisy.”

— Thomas Merton

404. “The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

406. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

408. “People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.”

— Thomas Merton

409. “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

410. “A contemplative is not one who takes his prayer seriously, but one who takes God seriously, who is famished for truth, who seeks to live in generous simplicity, in the spirit. An ardent and sincere humility is the best protection for his life of prayer.”

— Thomas Merton

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “The humble man also loves himself, and seeks to be loved and honored, not because love and honor are due to him but because they are not due to him. He seeks to be loved by the mercy of God.”

— Thomas Merton

416. “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

417. “Too much happiness, too much unhappiness, out of due time, men are thrown off balance. What will they do next? Thought runs wild. No control. They start everything, finish nothing. Here competition begins, here the idea of excellence is born, and robbers appear in the world.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

419. “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

420. “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

421. “Love not only prefers the good of another to my own, but it does not even compare the two.”

— Thomas Merton

422. “Those who are not grateful soon begin to complain of everything.”

— Thomas Merton

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

428. “The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive of perception.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

430. “We are warmed by the fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts.”

— Thomas Merton

431. “How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

433. “The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.”

— Thomas Merton

434. “Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within.”

— Thomas Merton

435. “The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is in fact an intensification of life a completeness a fullness a wholeness of life.”

— Thomas Merton

436. “In the end, no one can seek God unless he has already begun to find him.”

— Thomas Merton

437. “I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.”

— Thomas Merton

438. “The Hindus are not looking for us to send them men who will build schools and hospitals, although those things are good and useful in themselves – and perhaps very badly needed in India: they want to know if we have any saints to send them.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

440. “It can be said, without fear of error, that our meditation is as good as our faith.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

442. “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

443. “For our duties and our needs, in all the fundamental things for which we were created, come down in practice to the same thing.”

— Thomas Merton

444. “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

445. “It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are.”

— Thomas Merton

446. “Ultimately the only way that I can be myself is to become identified with Him in Whom is hidden the reason and fulfillment of my existence.”

— Thomas Merton

447. “I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. 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.”

— Thomas Merton

448. “He who is controlled by objects Loses possession of his inner self: If he no longer values himself, How can he value others? If he no longer values others, He is abandoned. He has nothing left!”

— Thomas Merton

449. “The truly sacred attitude toward life is in no sense an escape from the sense of nothingness that assails us when we are left alone with ourselves.”

— Thomas Merton

450. “There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another’s solitude.”

— Thomas Merton