Quotes from Thomas Merton

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.

I can depend less and less on my own power and sense of direction...It is so strange to advance backwards and get where you are going in a totally unexpected way

Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all others.

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.

Prayer is an expression of who we are...We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.

The sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.

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?

Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.

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.

Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.

Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.

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.

The least of the work of learning is done in classrooms.

The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.

A daydream is an evasion.

The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.

Love in fact is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.

Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.

A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair.

Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.

I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me.

You are made in the image of what you desire.