Pride makes us artificial; humility makes us real - Thomas Merton
Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him. - Thomas Merton
The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little. - Thomas Merton
We do not want to be beginners [at prayer]. but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life! - Thomas Merton
He's not a safe safe or a tame God, securely lodged behind the bars of a distant Heaven; He has the most annoying manner of showing up when we least want Him; of confronting us in the strangest ways. - Thomas Merton
Pardon all runners,All speechless, alien winds,All mad waters.Pardon their impulses,Their wild attitudes,Their young flights, their reticence.When a message has no clothes onHow can it be spoken. - Thomas Merton
Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more. - Thomas Merton
Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist. - Thomas Merton
By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet. - Thomas Merton
To allow oneself to be carried awayBy a multitude of conflicting concerns,To surrender to too many demands,...To commit oneself to too many projects,To want to help everyone with everythingIs to succumb to violence. - Thomas Merton
If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. - Thomas Merton
Into this world, this demented innin which there is absolutely no room for him at all,Christ comes uninvited. - Thomas Merton
You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope. - Thomas Merton
When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well. - Thomas Merton
All theology is a kind of birthdayEach one who is born Comes into the world as a questionFor which old answersAre not sufficient… - Thomas Merton
Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience. - Thomas Merton
How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. - Thomas Merton
In the end, no one can seek God unless he has already begun to find him. - Thomas Merton
The least of learning is done in the classrooms. - Thomas Merton
The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt. - Thomas Merton
....it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning. - Thomas Merton
There are so many voices heard today asserting that one should "have religion" or "believe," but all they mean is that one should associate himself, "sign up" with some religious group. Stand up and be counted. As if religion were somehow primarily a matter of gregariousness... - Thomas Merton
The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both. - Thomas Merton
But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. - Thomas Merton
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. - Thomas Merton