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
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
We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Usefullness
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: Failure, Courage, Growth
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
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
Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Pride
Attachment to spiritual things is.. just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Attachment
The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Truth
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
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: Discipline, Being True to Yourself
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: Education, Colleges, Universities
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
If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Nation
Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Dying, Death
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
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
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
I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Control
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: Awareness, Compassion, Kindness
We do not exist for ourselves…
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Cooperation, Help
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
My life is … a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though I were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the Love and Protection of Him Who guides me.
—Thomas Merton
When we are strong, we are always much greater than the things that happen to us.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Strength
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Harmony, Balance
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
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
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
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, Patience, Being True to Yourself
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Jacques Barzun American Cultural Historian
- John Henry Newman British Theologian, Poet
- John Lancaster Spalding American Catholic Clergyman
- Frederick Buechner American Writer, Theologian
- Jean-luc Godard French-born Swiss Film Director
- Edward McKendree Bounds American Methodist Clergyman
- William Sloane Coffin American Clergyman
- Harry Emerson Fosdick American Baptist Minister
- William Laurence Sullivan American Unitarian Clergyman
- Charles Henry Parkhurst American Clergyman
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