854 Quotes by Thomas Merton

In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart.

We are warmed by the fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts.

But the pride of those who live as if they believed they were better than anyone else is rooted in a secret failure to believe in their own goodness.

For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one’s own contingent self, cannot exist where there is no contingent self to which anything can be attributed.

How free you can become if you stop worrying about things that don’t concern you!

We believe, not because we want to know, but because we want to be.

The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God.

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.

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, and from the habitual union of their souls with God in deep faith and charity.