Famous Thomas Merton Quotations

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"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."
by Thomas Merton
"A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book."
by Thomas Merton
"It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God."
by 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."
by 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."
by Thomas Merton
"Solitude 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."
by Thomas Merton
"Stop asking yourself questions that have no meaning. Or if they have, you'll find out when you need to -- find out both the questions and the answers."
by Thomas Merton
"The least of learning is done in the classrooms."
by Thomas Merton
"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."
by Thomas Merton
"We do not exist for ourselves."
by Thomas Merton
"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."
by 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."
by 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 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."
by Thomas Merton
"Since factory farming exerts a violent and unnatural force upon the living organisms of animals and birds in order to increase production and profits; since it involves callous and cruel exploitation of life, with implicit contempt for nature, I must join in the protest being uttered against it. It does not seem that these methods have any really justifiable purpose, except to increase the quantity of production at the expense of quality—if that can be called a justifiable purpose."
by Thomas Merton
"Attachment to spiritual things is.. just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else."
by 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."
by Thomas Merton
"We do not exist for ourselves..."
by 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"
by Thomas Merton
"I certainly do not consider myself permanently dedicated to a crusade for peace and I am beginning to see the uselessness and absurdity of getting too involved in a 'peace movement.' The chief reason why I have spoken out was that I felt I owed it to my conscience to do so. There are certain things that have to be clearly stated. I had in mind particularly the danger arising from the fact that some of the most belligerent people in this country are Christians, on the one hand fundamentalist Protestants and on the other certain Catholics. They both tend to appeal to the bomb to do a 'holy' work of destruction in the name of Christ and Christian truth. This is completely intolerable and the truth has to be stated. I cannot in conscience remain indifferent."
by Thomas Merton
"The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real."
by Thomas Merton
"One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us."
by Thomas Merton
"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."
by Thomas Merton
"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."
by Thomas Merton
"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."
by 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..."
by Thomas Merton
"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."
by Thomas Merton


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