854 Quotes by Thomas Merton

Pride makes us artificial; humility makes us real.

The eyes of the saint make all beauty holy and the hands of the saint consecrate everything they touch to the glory of God, and the saint is never offended by anything and judges no man’s sin because he does not know sin. He knows the mercy of God. He knows that his own mission on earth is to bring that mercy to all men. W.

The logic of the poet – that is, the logic of language or the experience itself – develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.

The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence – it is unshakeable.

How crazy it is to be “yourself” by trying to live up to an image of yourself you have unconsciously created in the minds of others.

How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man’s city?

The beginning of the fight against hatred, the basic Christian answer to hatred, is not the commandment to love, but what must necessarily come before in order to make the commandment bearable and comprehensible. It is a prior commandment, to believe. The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved. The faith that one is loved by God. That faith that one is loved by God although unworthy – or, rather, irrespective of one’s worth!

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.

There is a dark force for destruction within us, which someone has called the “death instinct.” It is a terribly powerful thing, this force generated by our own frustrated self-love battling with itself. It is the power of a self-love that has turned into self-hatred and which, in adoring itself, adores the monster by which it is consumed.