68 Inspirational Thomas Merton Quotes You Cannot Miss

Thomas Merton Quotes Love

Do you look for new definitions of love? These Thomas Merton quotes might help.

• “Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.” — Thomas Merton

• “The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.” — Thomas Merton

• “Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.” — Thomas Merton

• “Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity.” — Thomas Merton

• “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.” — Thomas Merton

• “I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.” — Thomas Merton

• “The deepest of level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless ... beyond speech ... beyond concept.” — Thomas Merton

• “The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.” — Thomas Merton

• “"Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.” — Thomas Merton

• “Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.” — Thomas Merton

Quotes from Thomas Merton

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Here are some Thomas Merton quotes to live by.

• “For language to have meaning, there must be intervals of silence somewhere, to divide word from word and utterance from utterance. He who retires into silence does not necessarily hate language. Perhaps it is love and respect for language which imposes silence upon him. For the mercy of God is not heard in words unless it is heard, both before and after the words are spoken, in silence.” — Thomas Merton

• “But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.” — Thomas Merton

• “If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology. For religion goes beyond words and actions, and attains to the ultimate Truth only in silence and Love.” — Thomas Merton

• “In a world of noise, confusion and conflict it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace. In such places love can blossom.” — Thomas Merton

• “In Silence God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.” — Thomas Merton

• “There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious unity and integrity is wisdom, the mother of us all, "natura naturans." There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness, and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being.” — Thomas Merton

• “The world of men has forgotten the joys of silence, the peace of solitude, which is necessary, to some extent, for the fullness of human living. Man cannot be happy for long unless he is in contact with the springs of spiritual life which are hidden in the depths of his own soul. If man is exiled constantly from his own home, locked out of his spiritual solitude, he ceases to be a true person.” — Thomas Merton

• “The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.” — Thomas Merton

• “When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.” — Thomas Merton

• “When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God.” — Thomas Merton

• “Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally.” — Thomas Merton

• “The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude.” — Thomas Merton

• “The reality that is present to us and in us: call it being...Silence. And the simple fact that by being attentive, by learning to listen (or recovering the natural capacity to listen) we can find ourself engulfed in such happiness that it cannot be explained: the happiness of being at one with everything in that hidden ground of Love for which there can be no explanations.... May we all grow in grace and peace, and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us.” — Thomas Merton

• “Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.” — Thomas Merton

• “It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.” — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes on Silence

Do you want to understand more about silence and solitude? These Thomas Merton quotes will help.

• “To be alone by being part of the universe-fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without.” — Thomas Merton

• “Prayer is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him...who loves us, who is near to us.” — Thomas Merton

• “Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.” — Thomas Merton

• “What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?” — Thomas Merton

• “When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.” — Thomas Merton

• “We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!” — Thomas Merton

• “The sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.” — Thomas Merton

• “The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God; and we seek Him successfully when we realize that we cannot find Him unless He shows Himself to us, and yet at the same time that He would not have inspired us to seek Him unless we had already found Him.” — Thomas Merton

• “It's a risky thing to pray and the danger is that our very prayers get between God and us. The great thing in prayer is not to pray, but to go directly to God. . . . The fact is, though, that if you descend into the depths of your own spirit and arrive somewhere near the center of what you are, you are confronted with the inescapable truth that, at the very root of your existence, you are in constant and immediate contact with the infinite power of God.” — Thomas Merton

• “The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer.” — Thomas Merton

• “I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place … It is certainly part of my life of prayer.” — Thomas Merton

• “In meditative prayer, one thinks and speaks not only with the mind and lips, but in a certain sense with one's whole being... All good meditative prayer is a conversation of our entire self to God.” — Thomas Merton

• “None of our prayers should ever be petitions for our own needs: for this is only another subtle way of trying to put ourselves on the same plane as God — acting as if we had no needs, as if we were not creatures, not dependent on Him.” — Thomas Merton

• “The lights of prayer that make us imagine we are beginning to be angels are sometimes only signs that we are finally beginning to be men. We do not have a high enough opinion of our own nature. We think we are at the gates of heaven and we are only just beginning to come into our own realm as free and intelligent beings.” — Thomas Merton

• “You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer.” — Thomas Merton

• “The simplicity that all this presupposes is not easy to attain. I find that my life constantly threatens to become complex and divisive. A life of prayer is basically a very simple life. This simplicity, however, is the result of asceticism and effort: it is not a spontaneous simplicity.” — Thomas Merton

• “Prayer is an expression of who we are...We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.” — Thomas Merton

• “The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will.” — Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes on Prayer

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Read these Thomas Merton quotes and you will feel that you get closer to God Almighty.

• “Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another.” — Thomas Merton

• “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. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.” — Thomas Merton

• “The most dangerous man in the world is the contemplative who is guided by nobody. He trusts his own visions. He obeys the attractions of an interior voice but will not listen to other men. He identifies the will of God with anything that makes him feel, within his own heart, a big, warm, sweet interior glow. The sweeter and the warmer the feeling is, the more he is convinced of his own infallibility.” — Thomas Merton

• “We are not converted only once in our lives but many times and this endless series of conversions and inner revolutions leads to our transformation.” — Thomas Merton

• “It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.” — Thomas Merton

• “People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.” — Thomas Merton

• “Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn’t already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.” — Thomas Merton

• “Every breath we draw is a gift of God’s love; every moment of existence is a grace.” — Thomas Merton

• “The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.” — Thomas Merton

• “Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.” — Thomas Merton

• “Our real journey in life is interior; It is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary to respond to that action.” — Thomas Merton

• “If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.” — Thomas Merton

• “Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. Or perhaps he is afraid of you because he feels that you are afraid of him. And perhaps if he believed you are capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy.” — Thomas Merton

• “Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.” — Thomas Merton

• “Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and joy you have not yet begun to live.” — Thomas Merton