Quotes from Thomas Merton

The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude.

In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question.

I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God.

Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.

There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.

The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to him.

To be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.

O God, my God, the night has values that the day never dreamed of.

God Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true self.

God, have mercy on me in the blindness in which I hope I am seeking You!

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.

Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.

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.

Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered.

Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good.

If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him.

It might be good to open our eyes and see.

A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy.

Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast.

Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found.

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.

The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.

I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is.

It is my belief, that we should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in that part of humanity that is most remote from our own.