Thomas Merton (1915–68,) ordained as Father Louis, was a Trappist monk, social critic, spiritual guide, and minor poet. He was one of the most prominent American Roman Catholic writers of the 20th century.
Born in Prades in the French Pyrenees to a New Zealander father and an American mother, Merton studied and taught English at Columbia University. In 1938, he converted to Roman Catholicism and, in 1941, joined the Trappist order at Our Lady of Gethsemane Abbey, Kentucky.
Merton’s bestselling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1946; also titled Elected Silence, 1949,) depicted a traditional conversion story to Catholicism. However, Merton’s approach to monastic spirituality, chronicled in his vast literary output, resonated the transformations in modern-day Catholicism—a greater openness to other spiritual beliefs and a deep concern for the ethical dilemmas of the modern world.
Merton wrote personal journals, poetry, and social criticism. His notable works include Seeds of Contemplation (1949) and Contemplation in a World of Action (1971.) A collaborator of the Dalai Lama, Zen author D. T. Suzuki, and Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Merton authored popular books on Zen Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism.
Morton’s perception of monasticism matured, and he became a hermit. He died from accidental electrocution by a damaged shower while attending a world conference of contemplatives in Bangkok.
Lawrence S. Cunningham, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, wrote the acclaimed biography Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision (1999.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Thomas Merton
We are already one and we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. Whatever we have to be is what we are.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Unity
Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity. The Seven Storey Mountain.
—Thomas Merton
Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Pride
Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Expectation
The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Truth
Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Memory
I am willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them—the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Colleges, Universities, Education
Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Acceptance
You must realize that it is the ordinary way of God’s dealings with us that our ideas do not work out speedily and efficiently as we would like them to. The reason for this is not only the loving wisdom of God, but also the fact that our acts have to fit into a great complex pattern that we cannot possibly understand. I have learned over the years that Providence is always a whole lot wiser than any of us, and that there are always not only good reasons, but the very best reasons for the delays and blocks that often seem to us so frustrating and absurd.
—Thomas Merton
If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Nation
When we are strong, we are always much greater than the things that happen to us.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Strength
Attachment to spiritual things is.. just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Attachment
What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forests, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the bridges, and the talk of the water courses everywhere in the hollows!Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Wilderness
When ambition ends, happiness begins.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Happiness, Ambition, One liners
Peace is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Peace
Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Events
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous…
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Discovery, Being True to Yourself, Patience
If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.
—Thomas Merton
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Balance, Harmony
I certainly do not consider myself permanently dedicated to a crusade for peace and I am beginning to see the uselessness and absurdity of getting too involved in a ‘peace movement.’ The chief reason why I have spoken out was that I felt I owed it to my conscience to do so. There are certain things that have to be clearly stated. I had in mind particularly the danger arising from the fact that some of the most belligerent people in this country are Christians, on the one hand fundamentalist Protestants and on the other certain Catholics. They both tend to appeal to the bomb to do a ‘holy’ work of destruction in the name of Christ and Christian truth. This is completely intolerable and the truth has to be stated. I cannot in conscience remain indifferent.
—Thomas Merton
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness”, the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Vision, Life, Solitude
The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: One liners, Temptation
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
Topics: Originality
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
Topics: Ego
One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Reality
We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Advertising
Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Being True to Yourself, Discipline
Each one of us has some kind of vocation. We are all called by God to share in His life and in His Kingdom. Each one of us is called to a special place in the Kingdom. If we find that place we will be happy. If we do not find it, we can never be completely happy. For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God’s will, to be what God wants us to be.
—Thomas Merton
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Love
The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Praise
I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Fear, God, Faith, Divinity, Anxiety
The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Compassion, Kindness, Awareness
We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Courage, Growth, Failure
To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us – and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him. Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.
—Thomas Merton
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
Topics: America
Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for Joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and joy you have not yet begun to live.
—Thomas Merton
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Spirit, Spirituality
We have what we seek. It is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Discovery
He who attempts to act and do things for others and for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give to others. He will communicate to them only the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, and his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas.
—Thomas Merton
The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Personality
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