Thomas Merton Quotes

“We are what we love. If we love God, in whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in him and we cannot help being happy: we have already achieved something of the fullness of being for which we were destined in our creation. If we love everything else but God, we contradict the image born in our very essence, and we cannot help being unhappy, because we are living a caricature of what we are meant to be.”
― Thomas Merton, A Book of Hours

“One might say I had decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world. So perhaps I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves. I attempt to cultivate this plant without contempt in the middle of the night and water it with psalms and prophecies in silence. It becomes the most rare of all the trees in the garden, at once the primordial paradise tree, the axis mundi, the cosmic axle, and the Cross. Nulla silva talem profert. There is only one such tree. It cannot be multiplied. It is not interesting.”
― Thomas Merton

“In the end, no one can seek God unless he has already begun to find him.”
― Thomas Merton

“Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote that nothing can be expressed about solitude "that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.”
― Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

“If what God says is the truest thing about us, then it makes sense to follow him and accept our As-Is condition as the starting point. Thomas Merton said, 'The reason we never enter into the deepest reality of our relationship with God is that we so seldom acknowledge our utter nothingness before him.' If we confess the truth about ourselves, there's every reason to fear God will say, 'Yeah, that's right; and anotherthing...' and we're fairly sure there will be another thing. We are like people afraid to tell the doctor where we really hurt because we fear we may be sicker than we think.

We are sicker than we think. We're dying and, crazily, running from the healer because we're ashamed, because we hate ourselves for all we are and all we're not.”
― Brennan Manning

“Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world's sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis of our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“If we were able to distill all human experience to its essence, it would be a question on the lips of a man named Jesus. As he asked Peter, he asks all mankind, "Who do you say that I am?"

"Our idea of God," observed Thomas Merton, "tells us more about ourselves than about Him.”
― Ron Brackin

“We overcome the evil in the world by the charity and compassion of God, and in so doing we drive all evil out of our own hearts. The evil that is in us is more than moral. There is a psychological evil, the distortion caused by selfishness and sin. Good moral intentions are enough to correct what is formally bad in our moral acts. But in order that our charity may heal the wounds of sin in our whole soul it must reach down into the furthest depths of our humanity, cleaning out all the infection of anxiety and false guilt that spring from pride and fear, releasing the good that has been held back by suspicion and prejudice and self-conceit. Everything in our nature must find its right place in the life of charity, so that the whole man may be lifted up to God, that the entire person may be sanctified and not only the intentions of his will.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“All theology is a kind of birthday
Each one who is born
Comes into the world as a question
For which old answers
Are not sufficient…”
― Thomas Merton

“As a matter of face, Zen is at present most fashionable in America among those who are least concerned with moral discipline. Zen has, indeed, become for us a symbol of moral revolt. It is true, the Zen-man's contempt for conventional and formalistic social custom is a healthy phenomenon, but it is healthy only because it presupposes a spiritual liberty based on freedom from passion, egotism and self-delusion. A pseudo-Zen attitude which seeks to justify a complete moral collapse with a few rationalizations based on the Zen Masters is only another form of bourgeois self-deception. It is not an expression of healthy revolt, but only another aspect of the same lifeless and inert conventionalism against which it appears to be protesting.”
― Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite

“As Thomas Merton correctly observes, “Sufism looks at man as a heart. . . . The heart is the faculty by which man knows God”, and so the supreme aim in Sufism is nothing else than “to develop a heart that knows God”. In the words of Rumi, “I have looked into my own heart; it is there that I have seen Him; He was nowhere else.” This leads Martin Lings to observe in his book What is Sufism?, “What indeed is Sufism, subjectively speaking, if not ‘heart-wakefulness’?”. Illustrating this, he quotes al-Hallâj: “I saw my Lord with the Eye of the Heart.” The Hesychast tradition of the Orthodox Church, for its part, speaks repeatedly of “prayer of the heart”, of the “discovery of the place of the heart”, of the “descent from the head to the heart”, and of the “union of the intellect (nous) with the heart”. (p. 5)
– Kallistos Ware, Chapter 1: How Do We Enter the Heart?”
― James S. Cutsinger, Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East

“How I pray is breathe.”
― Thomas Merton, Day of a Stranger

“The story of the Fall tells us in mythical language that "original sin" is not simply a stigma arbitrarily making good pleasures seem guilty, but a basic inauthenticity, a kind of predisposition to bad faith in our understanding of ourselves and of the world. It implies a determined willfulness in trying to make things be other than they are in order that we may be able to make them subserve, at any moment, to our individual desire for pleasure or for power. But since things do not obey our arbitrary impulsions, and since we cannot make the world correspond to and confirm the image of it dictated by our needs and illusions, our willfulness is inseparable from error and from suffering. Hence, Buddhism says, deluded life itself is in a state of Dukkha, and every movement of desire tends to bear ultimate fruit in pain rather than lasting joy, in hate rather than love, in destruction rather than creation. (Let us note in passing that when technological skill seems in fact to give man almost absolute power in manipulating the world, this fact is no way reverses his original condition of brokenness and error but only makes it all the more obvious. We who live in the age of the H-bomb and the extermination camp have reason to reflect on this, though such reflection is a bit unpopular.)”
― Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite

“The journey inward is what gives meaning to the life outside ourselves. Not in any static, dogmatic, once-for-all way either, but in a way that grows and develops and changes to meet different circumstances, different stages of development. Contemplation is not an optional extra -- it is, as much as action, part of the very stuff of being human." ”
― Monica Furlong

“On 10 December 1968, at a Red Cross centre near Bangkok, Thomas Merton gave a lecture affirming the place of the monastic as an outsider. ‘The monk is essentially someone who takes up a critical attitude toward the world and its structures,’ he remarked, ‘somebody who says, in one way or another, that the claims of the world are fraudulent.’

Afterward, he went back to his cottage to rest and to shower before a scheduled evening panel discussion. He emerged from his shower, walking with wet feet on a wet floor. It’s surmised that he reached for a fan, which was later shown to have faulty wiring, and suffered a fatal electric shock. Merton’s body was flown back to the US on an Air Force transport to Oakland, then sent on a commercial carrier to Louisville.”
― Jane Brox, Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives

“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, Thoughts in Solitude

“A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.”
― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

“The function of a university is to teach a [person] how to drink tea. not because anything is important, but because it is usual to drink tea, or for that matter anything else under the sun. And whatever you do, every act, however small, can teach you everything, provided you see who is acting.”
― Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton on Prayer

“The function of a university is to teach a [person] how to drink tea, not because anything is important, but because it is usual to drink tea, or for that matter anything else under the sun. And whatever you do, every act, however small, can teach you everything, provided you see who is acting.”

― Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton On Prayer”
― Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton on Prayer

“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 Bashō 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, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.”
― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Comtemplation