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
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
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
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 strong, we are always much greater than the things that happen to us.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Strength
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
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
Perhaps I am stronger than I think.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Confidence, Assurance
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: Death, Dying
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Decisions
We do not exist for ourselves…
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Help, Cooperation
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
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
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
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
When ambition ends, happiness begins.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Happiness, One liners, Ambition
Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Pride
Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Security, Spirit, Spiritual, Anxiety
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
Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a man deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Hedonism, Self-Pity
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
If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Nation
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
In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for “finding himself.” If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Responsibility
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
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
I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Divinity, Faith, Fear, God, Anxiety
The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: One liners, Temptation
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
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
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
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