Top 500 Thomas Merton Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

427. “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

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “The “spiritual life” is then the perfectly balanced life in which the body with its passions and instincts, the mind with its reasoning and its obedience to principle and the spirit with its passive illumination by the Light and Love of God form one complete man who is in God and with God and from God and for God. One man in whom God is all in all. One man in whom God carries out His own will without obstacle.”

— Thomas Merton

438. “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

439. “Power is made perfect in infirmity, and our very helplessness is all the more potent a claim on that Divine Mercy Who calls to Himself the poor, the little ones, the heavily burdened.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

441. “It seems to me that I have greater peace and am close to God when I am not “trying to be a contemplative,” or trying to be anything special, but simply orienting my life fully and completely towards what seems to be required of a man like me at a time like this.”

— Thomas Merton

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

— Thomas Merton

443. “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

444. “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

445. “You can now find the most ardent Christians lined up in the most ridiculous, regressive, irrational parades. If they were concerned only with flying saucers and conversations with the departed it would not be so bad: but they are also deeply involved in racism, in quasi-Fascist nationalism, in every shade of fanatical hate cult, and in every semilunatic pressure group.”

— Thomas Merton

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

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. “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