854 Quotes by Thomas Merton

God has brought me to Kentucky...the precise place he has chosen for my sanctification.

To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God.

Love, in fact, is the spiritual life; and without it, all other exercises of the spirit are emptied of content.

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.

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

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.

We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation

There is a subtle but inescapable connection between the "sacred" attitude and the acceptance of one's in most self.

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...