110+ Thomas Merton Quotes On Faith, Peace And Gratitude

Thomas Merton was an American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, poet, social activist, and scholar of comparative religion. He was a major spiritual figure of the twentieth century and is widely recognized as one of the most influential American Catholic authors of the twentieth century. He is known for works such as The Seven Storey Mountain and New Seeds of Contemplation. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Thomas Merton on love, faith, peace.

Top 10 Thomas Merton Quotes

1. 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.
2. ‎"Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.
3. Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.
4. Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
5. The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds
6. People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
7. Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible.
8. Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.
9. Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
10. Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.

Thomas Merton Image Quotes

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real. — Thomas Merton

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. — Thomas Merton

You are made in the image of what you desire. — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Short Quotes

• Perhaps I am stronger than I think.
• We cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great.
• Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.
• Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand.
• We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to "like" one another.
• We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
• The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
• The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.
• I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
• Love is our true destiny.

Thomas Merton Quotes About Love

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

Every breath we draw is a gift of God's love; every moment of existence is a grace. — Thomas Merton

True happiness is found in unselfish Love, A love which increases in proportion as it is shared. — 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

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. — Thomas Merton

For power can guarantee the interests of some men but it can never foster the good of man. Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all the others. Only love can attain and preserve the good of all. Any claim to build the security of all on force is a manifest imposture. — 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

Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty. — 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

To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything. — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes About Faith

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

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

Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more. — Thomas Merton

The fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the wind, and join in the general Dance. — Thomas Merton

Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God. — Thomas Merton

Faith is the door to the full inner life of the Church, a life which includes not only access to an authoritative teaching but above all to a deep personal experience which is at once unique and yet shared by the whole Body of Christ, in the Spirit of Christ. — Thomas Merton

The biggest disease in North America is busyness. — Thomas Merton

God must be allowed the right to speak unpredictably.... We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend. We must find him in the pagan or we will lose him in our own selves, substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction. — Thomas Merton

Ultimately faith is the only key to the universe. The final meaning of human existence, and the answers to the questions on which all our happiness depends cannot be found in any other way. — Thomas Merton

You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt. — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes About Peace

Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ. — Thomas Merton

When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable. — 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

If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world. — Thomas Merton

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. — 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

In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart. — Thomas Merton

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs; activism and overwork. — Thomas Merton

The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable — Thomas Merton

I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face. — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes About Gratitude

Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder. — Thomas Merton

The grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference. — Thomas Merton

The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to him. — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes About Silence

It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister. — Thomas Merton

If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology. For religion goes beyond words and actions, and attains to the ultimate Truth only in silence and Love. — Thomas Merton

Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally. — Thomas Merton

But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. — Thomas Merton

One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. — Thomas Merton

One opens the inner doors of one's heart to the infinite silences of the Spirit, out of whose abysses love wells up without fail and gives itself to all. — Thomas Merton

Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say. — Thomas Merton

Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence. — Thomas Merton

I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and happening, and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it. — Thomas Merton

To be alone by being part of the universe-fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without. — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes About Prayer

The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer — Thomas Merton

The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God; and we seek Him successfully when we realize that we cannot find Him unless He shows Himself to us, and yet at the same time that He would not have inspired us to seek Him unless we had already found Him. — Thomas Merton

Prayer is an expression of who we are...We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment. — Thomas Merton

The sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all. — Thomas Merton

We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life! — Thomas Merton

The simplicity that all this presupposes is not easy to attain. I find that my life constantly threatens to become complex and divisive. A life of prayer is basically a very simple life. This simplicity, however, is the result of asceticism and effort: it is not a spontaneous simplicity. — Thomas Merton

None of our prayers should ever be petitions for our own needs: for this is only another subtle way of trying to put ourselves on the same plane as God — acting as if we had no needs, as if we were not creatures, not dependent on Him. — Thomas Merton

What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer? — Thomas Merton

The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will. — Thomas Merton

You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer. — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes About Nature

We must suffer. Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason. It helps think clearly, judge sanely. It strengthens the action of our will. — 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

One has to be alone, under the sky, Before everything falls into place and one finds his or her own place in the midst of it all. We have to have the humility to realize ourselves as part of nature. — Thomas Merton

Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness. — Thomas Merton

The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive of perception. — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes About Art

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

Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains. — Thomas Merton

The art of our time, sacred art included, will necessarily be characterized by a certain poverty, grimness and roughness which correspond to the violent realities of a cruel age. — Thomas Merton

The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical. — Thomas Merton

Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God. — Thomas Merton

Imagination has the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new. — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes About Life

We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full. — 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

A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live. — 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

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you. — 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

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the other.... The whole purpose of life is to live by love. — Thomas Merton

Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny....To work out our identity in God. — Thomas Merton

If we seek paradise outside ourselves, we cannot have paradise in our hearts. — Thomas Merton

The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places. — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes About Mystic

The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. — Thomas Merton

This act of total surrender is not merely a fantastic intellectual and mystical gamble; it is something much more serious. It is an act of love for this unseen person, who, in the very gift of love by which we surrender ourselves to his reality also makes his presence known to us. — Thomas Merton

How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived. — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes About Contemplative

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

True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques. — Thomas Merton

Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. — Thomas Merton

To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being. — Thomas Merton

There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues. — Thomas Merton

As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination. — Thomas Merton

Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular. — Thomas Merton

Action is the stream, and contemplation is the spring. — Thomas Merton

We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us. — Thomas Merton

Contemplation is the loving sense of this life, this presence and this eternity. — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes About Spiritual

You are made in the image of what you desire. — Thomas Merton

For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air. — Thomas Merton

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? — Thomas Merton

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false Self. We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves. — Thomas Merton

The importance of detachment from things, the importance of poverty, is that we are supposed to be free from things that we might prefer to people. Wherever things have become more important than people, we are in trouble. That is the crux of the whole matter. — 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

On Pride: This sickness is most dangerous when it succeeds in looking like humility. When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless. — Thomas Merton

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect on me is to live on the doorstep of hell. Selfishness is doomed to frustration centered as it is upon a lie. To live exclusively for myself, I must make all things bend themselves to my will as if I were a god. — Thomas Merton

Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered. — Thomas Merton

Saints are what they are not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everyone else. — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes About Fact

Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger. — Thomas Merton

God has left sin in the world in order that there may be forgiveness: not only the secret forgiveness by which He Himself cleanses our souls, but the manifest forgiveness by which we have mercy on one another and so give expression to the fact that He is living, by His mercy, in our own hearts. — Thomas Merton

The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it. — Thomas Merton

For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. — 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

This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality, consists not in getting rid of the self but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first. — Thomas Merton

The whole world has risen in Christ... If God is 'all in all,' then everything is in fact paradise, because it is filled with the glory and presence of God, and nothing is any more separated from God. — Thomas Merton

A humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact, he is not afraid of anything, even himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God. — Thomas Merton

I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. — Thomas Merton

Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest. — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes About Truth

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. — Thomas Merton

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

We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real...and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. (295) — Thomas Merton

The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear. — Thomas Merton

Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love. — Thomas Merton

To those who have no personal experience of this revolutionary aspect of Christian truth, but who see only the outer crust of dead, human conservatism that tends to form around the Church the way barnacles gather on the hull of a ship, all this talk about dynamism sounds foolish. — Thomas Merton

We cannot possess the truth fully until it has entered into the very substance of our life by good habits, and by a certain perfection of moral activity. — Thomas Merton

The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe. — Thomas Merton

It seems to me that the darkness that has troubled you ... comes from one very serious source. Without wanting to be in conflict with the truth and with the will of God, we are actually going against God's will and His teaching. — Thomas Merton

We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it. — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Famous Quotes And Sayings

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real. — 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

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. — Thomas Merton

Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn't already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. — Thomas Merton

May God prevent us from becoming "right-thinking men"-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police. — Thomas Merton

Ash Wednesday is full of joy...The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust. — Thomas Merton

You are made in the image of what you desire. — Thomas Merton

Weaknesses and deficiencies . . . play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another. — Thomas Merton

I see no contradiction between Buddhism and Christianity ... I intend to become as good a Buddhist as I can. — Thomas Merton

We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of others and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us. — Thomas Merton

The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both. — Thomas Merton

There were only a few shepherds at the first Bethlehem. The ox and the donkey understood more of the first Christmas than the high priests in Jerusalem. And it is the same today. — Thomas Merton

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. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most. — Thomas Merton

Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. Or perhaps he is afraid of you because he feels that you are afraid of him. And perhaps if he believed you are capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy. — Thomas Merton

How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me? — 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

Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon. — Thomas Merton

In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your piece of heart. As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy, because you have begun to trade in unrealities and there is no joy in things that do not exist. — Thomas Merton

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me...you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. — Thomas Merton

I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself. The "sanity" of modern man is about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of his survival. — Thomas Merton

We are not converted only once in our lives but many times and this endless series of conversions and inner revolutions leads to our transformation. — Thomas Merton

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

The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God. — Thomas Merton

To be risen with Christ means not only that one has a choice and that one may live by a higher law - the law of grace and love - but that one must do so. The first obligation of the Christian is to maintain their freedom from all superstitions, all blind taboos and religious formalities, indeed from all empty forms of legalism. — 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

Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a savior. — Thomas Merton

The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free. — 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

God, Who is everywhere, never leaves us. Yet He seems sometimes to be present, sometimes to be absent. If we do not know Him well, we do not realize that He may be more present to us when He is absent than when He is present. — Thomas Merton

Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves. — Thomas Merton

Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast. — Thomas Merton

But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God's love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God. — Thomas Merton

In an age where there is much talk about "being yourself," I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else. — 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

By my monastic life and vows I am saying no to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, the staged political trials, the judicial murders, the racial injustices, the economic tyrannies, and the whole socioeconomic apparatus which seems geared for nothing but global destruction in spite of all its fair words in favor of peace. — Thomas Merton

The psychological impotence of our enraged generation must be traced to the overwhelming accusation of insincerity which every man and woman has to confront, in the depths of his own soul, when he seeks to love merely for his own pleasure.And yet the men of our time do not love with enough courage to risk even discomfort or inconvenience. — Thomas Merton

....it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning. — Thomas Merton

We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time. God manifests Himself everywhere, in everything - in people and in things and in nature and in events ... The only thing is we don't see it ... I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere. — Thomas Merton

When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God. — Thomas Merton

I came with the notion of perhaps saying something for monks and to monks of all religions because I am supposed to be a monk. ... My dear brothers, WE ARE ALREADY ONE. BUT WE IMAGINE THAT WE ARE NOT. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are — Thomas Merton

Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how. — 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

We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others. — Thomas Merton

The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a man's life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul. — Thomas Merton

Life Lessons by Thomas Merton

1. Thomas Merton teaches us to be mindful and present in the moment, to appreciate the beauty of the world around us and to recognize our own spiritual journey.
2. He emphasizes the importance of humility and self-reflection, and encourages us to be compassionate and understanding towards others.
3. He reminds us that life is a journey of discovery and growth, and that it is through our relationships with others that we can truly find peace and joy.