854 Quotes by Thomas Merton

Difference between a vocation and a category. Those who fulfill their vocation to sanctity – or who are fulfilling it – are by that very fact unaccountable. They do not fit into categories. If you use a category in speaking of them you have to qualify statement at once, as if they also belonged to some completely different category. In actual fact, they are in no category, they are particular themselves...

TO say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. If, therefore, I do anything or think anything or say anything or know anything that is not purely for the love of God, it cannot give me peace, or rest, or fulfillment, or.

Get warm any way you can, and love God and pray.

It is here, in this poverty, that man regains the eternal being that once he was, now is and evermore shall be.

In an age where there is much talk about “being yourself” I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else. Rather it seems to me that when one is too intent on “being himself” he runs the risk of impersonating a shadow.

When sin becomes bitter, then Christ becomes sweet.

On the last day of January 1915, in the second year of the Great War, down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into this world.

Attachment to spiritual things is... just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else.

I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery.