Quotes from Thomas Merton

A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book, even though it may be about the love of God. There are many who think that because they have written about God, they have written good books. Then men pick up these books and say: if the ones who say they believe in God cannot find anything better than this to say about it, their religion cannot be worth much.

You pray and suffer and hang on and give things up and hope and sweat, and the varying contours of the struggle work out the shape of your liberty. When it ends, and when you have a good habit to work with, do not forget the moments of the battle when you were wounded and disarmed and helpless. Do not forget that, for all your efforts, you only won because of God, Who did the fighting in you.

Perhaps the book of life, in the end, is the book of what one has lived and if one has lived nothing, he is not in the book of life.

To live in communion, in genuine dialogue with others is absolutely necessary if man is to remain human. But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a man in the worst way, separates him from reality in a way that is almost painless.

We do not really know how to forgive until we know what it is to be forgiven. Therefore we should be glad that we can be forgiven by our brothers. It is our forgiveness of one another that makes the love of Jesus for us manifest in our lives, for in forgiving one another we act towards one another as He has acted towards us.

The opposite of sloth is not 'activity' or industriousness in a business sense. It is fortitude - including patience and long-suffering.

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...

My life is ... a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though 1 were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the love and protection of Him who guides me.

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.

The root of war is fear.

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.

There is not a flower that opens, not a seed that falls into the ground, and not an ear of wheat that nods on the end of its stalk in the wind that does not preach and proclaim the greatness and the mercy of God to the whole world.

Violence is essentially wordless, and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds

We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.

Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.

The biggest human temptation is... to settle for too little.

A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.

Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.

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!

What we have to be is what we are.

Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost

But 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 think I am living for.

The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear.