854 Quotes by Thomas Merton

  • Author Thomas Merton
  • Quote

    God makes us ask ourselves questions most often when He intends to resolve them. He gives us needs that He alone can satisfy, and awakens capacities that He means to fulfill. Any perplexity is liable to be a spiritual gestation, leading to a new birth and a mystical regeneration.

  • Share

  • Author Thomas Merton
  • Quote

    Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it! O.

  • Share

  • Author Thomas Merton
  • Quote

    I am happy that I can at least want to love God. Perhaps that is all I’ve got, but it is already all that is essential. And He will take care of the rest.

  • Share

  • Author Thomas Merton
  • Quote

    The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words. It is beyond speech. It is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity, but we discover an old unity. My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be, is what we are.

  • Share

  • Author Thomas Merton
  • Quote

    Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God. Hope is proportionate to detachment.

  • Share

  • Author Thomas Merton
  • Quote

    Place no hope in the feeling of assurance, in spiritual comfort. You may well have to get along without this.

  • Share

  • Author Thomas Merton
  • Quote

    What we venerate in the Saints, beyond and above all that we know is this secret; the mystery of an innocence and of an identity perfectly hidden in God.

  • Share

  • Author Thomas Merton
  • Quote

    There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.

  • Share

  • Author Thomas Merton
  • Quote

    Nevertheless, every day love corners me somewhere and surrounds me with peace without my having to look very far or very hard or do anything special. God.

  • Share