854 Quotes by Thomas Merton

The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God’s mercy to me.

We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.

Those who imagine that they can discover special gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God’s will and his grace.

Tu qui sedes in tenebris spe tua gaude: orta stella matutina, sol non tardabit.

Hence monastic prayer, especially meditation and contemplative prayer, is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him whom we have found, who loves us, who is near to us, who comes to us to draw us to himself.

A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions, is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of “choice” when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses.

The whole of life is to spiritualize our activities by humility and faith, to silence our nature by charity.

That is the trouble with all introverts: not that they look within but that they are obsessed with “looking within” and afraid to do anything else. Afraid that if they stop looking they will disintegrate.

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