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
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
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
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
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
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: Spirituality, Spirit
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
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
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times. Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Service, Being True to Yourself
Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Events
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
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
Attachment to spiritual things is.. just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Attachment
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
Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Faith
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: Patience, Being True to Yourself, Discovery
The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: One liners, Temptation
Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Pride
If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.
—Thomas Merton
Perhaps I am stronger than I think.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Confidence, Assurance
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
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
When we are strong, we are always much greater than the things that happen to us.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Strength
In the spiritual life there is no such thing as an indifference to love or hate.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Love
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 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
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
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
If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Nation
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, Kindness, Compassion
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
There is no way under the sun of making a man worthy of love, except by loving him.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Love, Laughter
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
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
It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as Gods will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe youtry to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as Gods will yourself!
—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
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
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
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
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Harmony, Balance
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Decisions
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