Quotes from Thomas Merton

The Mass is a memorial of Christ's sacrifice, not in the sense of an exterior commemoration, but as a living and supremely efficacious re-presentation of that sacrifice, pouring out into our hearts the redemptive power of the Cross and the grace of the resurrection, which enables us to live in God.

Ultimately the only way that I can be myself is to become identified with Him in Whom is hidden the reason and fulfillment of my existence.

Books that speak like God speak with too much authority to entertain us. Those that speak like good men hold us by their human charm; we grow by finding ourselves in them.

Great though books may be, friends though they may be to us, they are no substitute for persons, they are only means of contact with great persons...

It was because the saints were absorbed in God that they were truly capable of seeing and appreciating created things and it was because they loved Him alone that they alone loved everybody. S

To separate meditation from prayer, reading and contemplation is to falsify our picture of the monastic way of prayer. In proportion as meditation takes on a more contemplative character, we see that it is not only a means to an end, but also has something of the nature of an end.

The eyes of the saint make all beauty holy and the hands of the saint consecrate everything they touch to the glory of God, and the saint is never offended by anything and judges no man's sin because he does not know sin. He knows the mercy of God. He knows that his own mission on earth is to bring that mercy to all men. W

Oh, America, how I began to love your country! What miles of silences God has made in you for contemplation! If only people realized what all your mountains and forests are really for!

The beasts and the trees will one day share with us a new creation and we will see them as God sees them and know that they are very good. Meanwhile, if we embrace them for themselves, we discover both them and ourselves as evil. This is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—disgust with the things we have misused and hatred of ourselves for misusing them.

Good Shepherd, You have a wild and crazy sheep in love with thorns and brambles. But please don't get tired of looking for me! I know You won't. For You have found me. All I have to do is stay found.

God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of Himself.

But the pride of those who live as if they believed they were better than anyone else is rooted in a secret failure to believe in their own goodness.

By "prayer of the heart" we seek God himself present in the depths of our being and meet him there by invoking the name of Jesus in faith, wonder and love.

EVERY one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.

There are crimes that no one would commit as an individual which he willingly and bravely commits when acting in the name of his society, because he has been (too easily) convinced that evil is entirely different when it is done 'for the common good'.

Thank God! I am only another member of the human race, like all the rest of them... As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

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.

The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God.

Mere sitting at home and meditating on the divine presence is not enough for our time. We have to come to the end of a long journey and see that the stranger we meet there is no other than ourselves—which is the same as saying that we find Christ in him. For if the Lord is risen, as He said, He is actually or potentially alive in every man.

We do not see God in contemplation - we know Him by love: for his pure love and when we taste the experience of loving God for his own sake alone, we know by experience who and what he is.

If we do not respond to human affection we cannot be loved by God in the way in which He has willed to love us—with the Heart of the Man, Jesus Who is God, the Son of God, and the anointed Christ.

CII ABBOT PASTOR said: Just as bees are driven out by smoke, and their honey is taken away from them, so a life of ease drives out the fear of the Lord from man's soul and takes away all his good works.

God does not give his joy to us for ourselves alone, and if we could possess him for ourselves alone we would not possess him at all. Any joy that does not overflow from our souls and help other men to rejoice in God does not come to us form God. (But do not think that you have to see how it overflows into the souls of others. In the economy of his grace, you may be sharing his gifts with someone you will never know until you get to heaven.)

I think poetry must I think it must Stay open all night In beautiful cellars.