If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Nation
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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: God, Divinity, Fear, Anxiety, Faith
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
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Harmony, Balance
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 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
When we are strong, we are always much greater than the things that happen to us.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Strength
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
We do not exist for ourselves…
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Cooperation, Help
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
There is no way under the sun of making a man worthy of love, except by loving him.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Love, Laughter
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
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
Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Events
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, Universities, Colleges
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, Awareness, Kindness
Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Pride
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
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
Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Security, Spiritual, Anxiety, Spirit
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
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 Priest
- Charles Henry Parkhurst American Clergyman
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