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 significant things begin to
torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.
– Thomas Merton
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
Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.
– 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
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.
– Thomas Merton
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 to
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
It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not what he ought to be. If
we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be:
In our impatience we do away with him altogether.
– Thomas Merton
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to
too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in
everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.
– Thomas Merton
Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.
– Thomas Merton
Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God: For it is perhaps your
own coldness and avarice and mediocrity and materialism and selfishness that have chilled his
faith.
– Thomas Merton
What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean first of all, desiring to live, accepting life
as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it
enables us to give to others.
– Thomas Merton
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
If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my
hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living
fully for the thing I want to live for.
– Thomas Merton
The soul of man, left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness. It
is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside and
above itself. But when the light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and
seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in
it.
– Thomas Merton
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
Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am.
That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I
accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself.
– Thomas Merton
To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that Love is the reason for my
existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my
true character. Love is my name.
– Thomas Merton
The least of learning is done in the classrooms.
– Thomas Merton
How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another
man’s city?
– Thomas Merton
If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.
– Thomas Merton
Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when
we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who
he is, and who we are.
– Thomas Merton
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it
with another.
– Thomas Merton
It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to
many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes.
– Thomas Merton
God Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true self.
– Thomas Merton
You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What
you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and
to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
– Thomas Merton
The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
– Thomas Merton
One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own
business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to
reform other men.
– Thomas Merton
The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but
first of all by living.
– Thomas Merton
Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those
who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair
than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that
is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.
– Thomas Merton
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
– Thomas Merton
Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to
contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to
meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or
riding in a train.
– Thomas Merton
When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You
take your time, you do your work well.
– Thomas Merton
The Hindus are not looking for us to send them men who will build schools and hospitals,
although those things are good and useful in themselves – and perhaps very badly needed in
India: They want to know if we have any saints to send them.
– Thomas Merton
A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and
begins to live.
– Thomas Merton
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
If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.
– 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
Before we can become who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the
person who we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.
– Thomas Merton
There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is
maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.
– Thomas Merton
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
– Thomas Merton
The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional
rubbish that clutters our minds.
– Thomas Merton
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.
– Thomas Merton
Any fool knows that you don’t need money to get enjoyment out of life.
– Thomas Merton
Every moment and every event of everyman’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For
just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of
spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men.
– Thomas Merton
Humility is the surest sign of strength.
– Thomas Merton
Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of
Christ.
– Thomas Merton
I am against war, against violence, against violent revolution, for peaceful settlement of
differences, for nonviolent but nevertheless radical changes. Change is needed, and violence
will not really change anything: At most it will only transfer power from one set of bull-headed
authorities to another.
– Thomas Merton
Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we
are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new.
– Thomas Merton
Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.
– Thomas Merton
We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are
not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.
– Thomas Merton
You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt.
– Thomas Merton
Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in
your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate
tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another.
– Thomas Merton
When ambition ends, happiness begins.
– Thomas Merton
Love seeks one thing only: The good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary
effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.
– Thomas Merton
Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.
– 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.
– Thomas Merton
We stumble and fall constantly, even when we are most enlightened.
– Thomas Merton
Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.
– Thomas Merton
By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with
me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is
charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
– Thomas Merton
Life is this simple: We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is
shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.
– Thomas Merton
Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater
heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of
conscience.
– Thomas Merton
Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.
– Thomas Merton
I stand before you tonight to represent the people who do not count: The poor, the poets,
and monks. As long as there are people who are trying to realize the divine in themselves,
there shall be hope in the world.
– Thomas Merton
We do not exist for ourselves.
– Thomas Merton
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
Love is a special way of being alive.
– Thomas Merton