Thomas Merton famous quotes

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.
-- Thomas Merton

#Love #Valentines Day #Fate

‎"Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.
-- Thomas Merton

#Jobs #Stopping #Worthy

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

#Wisdom #Destiny #Want

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds
-- Thomas Merton

#Wisdom #Emotional #Mind

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

#Life #God #Spiritual

The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.
-- Thomas Merton

#Spiritual #Firsts #Life Is

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

#Moving On #Faith #Courage

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following Your Will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing...
-- Thomas Merton

#Faith #Believe #Inspiration

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

#Spiritual #Love You #Funny Relationship

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

#Giving

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

#Art #Self Discovery

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.
-- Thomas Merton

#Uplifting #Men #Soul

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

#Disappointment #Eye #Heart

The basic problem is not political, it is a-political and human. One of the most important things to do is to keep cutting deliberately through political lines and barriers and emphasizing the fact that these are largely fabrications and that there is another dimension, a genuine reality, totally opposed to the fictions of politics: the human dimension which politics pretend to arrogate entirely to themselves. This is the necessary first step along the long way toward the perhaps impossible task of purifying, humanizing and somehow illuminating politics themselves.
-- Thomas Merton

#Cutting #Reality #Long

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

#Desire #Made

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

#Love #Spiritual #Wisdom

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

#Wisdom #Book #Love You

Christ is born to us today, in order that he may appear to the whole world through us.
-- Thomas Merton

#Order #World #May

If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men--you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead.
-- Thomas Merton

#Wisdom #Writing #Men

Perhaps I am stronger than I think.
-- Thomas Merton

#Strength #Being Strong #Confidence

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

#Inspirational #Wisdom #Fake People

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

#Real #Thinking #Massage

People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular- and too lazy to think of anything better.
-- Thomas Merton

#Thinking #People #Lazy

Duty does not have to be dull. Love can make it beautiful and fill it with life.
-- Thomas Merton

#Beautiful #Duty

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

#Life #Wisdom #Men

True encounter with Christ liberates something within us, a power we did not know we had, a capacity to grow and change.
-- Thomas Merton

#Spiritual #Encounters #Christ

As long as I am content to know that He is infinitely greater than I, and that I cannot know Him unless He shows himself to me, I will have Peace, and He will be near me and in me, and I will rest in Him.
-- Thomas Merton

#Long #Shows

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.
-- Thomas Merton

#Love Is

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

#Christian #Religious #Mean

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched 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 life, which is inaccessable to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.
-- Thomas Merton

#God #Spiritual #Truth

Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.
-- Thomas Merton

#Wisdom #Ideas

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 #Life #Wisdom

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

#Spiritual #Failure #Fall

Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice �out there� calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice �in here� calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.
-- Thomas Merton

#Mean #Self #Voice

I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within.
-- Thomas Merton

#Kindness #Real #Thinking

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

#Mean #Giving #Firsts

The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear Brothers [and Sisters], 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

#Brother #Communication #Unity

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

#Inspirational #Courage #Men

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

#Wisdom #Truth #Discovery

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

#Spiritual #Attitude #Men

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

#Spiritual #Art #Order

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

#Spiritual #Self #Cherish

Every man becomes the image of the God he adores. He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead. He who loves corruption rots. He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing.
-- Thomas Merton

#Men #Shadow #Worship

It is almost impossible to overestimate the value of true humility and its power in the spiritual life. For the beginning of humility is the beginning of blessedness and the consummation of humility is the perfection of all joy. Humility contains in itself the answer to all the great problems of the life of the soul. It is the only key to faith, with which the spiritual life begins: for faith and humility are inseparable. In perfect humility all selfishness disappears and your soul no longer lives for itself or in itself for God: and it is lost and submerged in Him and transformed into Him.
-- Thomas Merton

#Spiritual #Humility #Keys

Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything.
-- Thomas Merton

#Risk

We are already ONE. We just think we are separate.
-- Thomas Merton

#Thinking

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
-- Thomas Merton

#Self Esteem #People #Shining

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

#Faith #Wisdom #Path

Our Christian destiny is, in fact, a great one: but we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. For our own idea of greatness is illusory, and if we pay too much attention to it we will be lured out of the peace and stability of the being God gave us, and seek to live in a myth we have created for ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.
-- Thomas Merton

#Christian #Wisdom #Greatness

The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.
-- Thomas Merton

#Love Is #Men #Way

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

#Play #Important #Weakness

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

#Faith #Gratitude #Grateful

Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.
-- Thomas Merton

#Ordinary Things #Splendor #Ordinary

Love is an intensification of life.
-- Thomas Merton

#Love Is

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

#Prayer #Sky #Wind

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

#Nice #Simple #Shining

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

#Grace #Moments #Existence

If we are to love sincerely, and with simplicity, we must first of all overcome the fear of not being loved.
-- Thomas Merton

#Simplicity #Firsts #Overcoming

Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
-- Thomas Merton

#Compassion #Awareness #Interdependence

The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is in fact an intensification of life a completeness a fullness a wholeness of life.
-- Thomas Merton

#Philosophy #Philosophical #Love Is

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

#Wind #Tree #Pine Trees

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

#People #Suffering #Trying

To be a saint is to be yourself.
-- Thomas Merton

#Being Yourself #Saint

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

#Names #Numbers #Giving

A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.
-- Thomas Merton

#Wisdom #Men #Succeed

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

#Eternity #Contemplation #This Life

The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed identity.
-- Thomas Merton

#Self #Order #Identity

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

#Giving Up #Self #Doe

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

#Teaching #Unique #Doors

Love is its own reward....
-- Thomas Merton

#Love You #Love Is #Rewards

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

#Brother #Silence #Solitude

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

#Christmas #Jerusalem #Today

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying [God]. It “consents,” so to speak, to [God's] creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree
-- Thomas Merton

#Wisdom #Mean #Essence

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

#Selfish #Believe #Men

For language to have meaning, there must be intervals of silence somewhere, to divide word from word and utterance from utterance. He who retires into silence does not necessarily hate language. Perhaps it is love and respect for language which imposes silence upon him. For the mercy of God is not heard in words unless it is heard, both before and after the words are spoken, in silence,
-- Thomas Merton

#Hate #Silence #Doe

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

#Wisdom #Temptation #Contemplative

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

#Law #Down And #Bears

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

#Men #May #Illusion

We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the thing necessary for us-whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need
-- Thomas Merton

#Missing #May #Able

The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.
-- Thomas Merton

#Peace #Violence #Humans

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

#Wisdom #May #Sometimes

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

#Men #Journey #Cities

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed . . . I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.
-- Thomas Merton

#Peace #War #Fall

Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am.
-- Thomas Merton

#Happiness #Ambition #Conclusion

The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.
-- Thomas Merton

#Imagination #Certain #Should

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice.
-- Thomas Merton

#Sacrifice #Demand #Heroic

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

#Keys #Understanding #Enemy

To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair.
-- Thomas Merton

#Wisdom #Evil #Justice

Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God.
-- Thomas Merton

#Spiritual #Oneness #Soul

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

#Wisdom #Prayer #Inspired

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

#True Relationship #Illusion #Contemplative

A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair.
-- Thomas Merton

#Despair #May #Hopeless

The deepest of level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless ... beyond speech ... beyond concept.
-- Thomas Merton

#Wisdom #Communication #Speech

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

#Wisdom #Journey #Acting

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

#Being Yourself #Age #Littles

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

#Dust #Joy #Sorrow

If you have love you will do all things well.
-- Thomas Merton

#Inspirational #Love You #Wells

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

#Art #Light #Imagination

Since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to be affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs.
-- Thomas Merton

#Destiny #Men #Hands

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

#Music #Reading #Blue