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
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
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
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
I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Anxiety, Faith, Fear, God, Divinity
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
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
Attachment to spiritual things is.. just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Attachment
When ambition ends, happiness begins.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: One liners, Happiness, Ambition
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
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
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: Growth, Failure, Courage
A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Living
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, Solitude, Life
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
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: Self-Pity, Hedonism
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
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
Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Pride
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
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 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 must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Decisions
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
Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Events
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
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
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
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
There is no way under the sun of making a man worthy of love, except by loving him.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Love, Laughter
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 Presbyterian Clergyman
- Harry Emerson Fosdick American Baptist Minister
- William Laurence Sullivan American Unitarian Clergyman
- Charles Henry Parkhurst American Clergyman
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