Quotes from Thomas Merton

Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.

The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.

I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to.

You are certainly one of the joys of life for all who have ever come within a mile of you.

Let me rest in Your will and be silent. Then the light of Your joy will warm my life. Its fire will burn in my heart and shine for Your glory. This is what I live for. Amen, amen.

We cannot possess the truth fully until it has entered into the very substance of our life by good habits, and by a certain perfection of moral activity.

... but any fool knows that you don't need money to get enjoyment out of life.

Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.

Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life.

Lovely morning! How lovely life can be!

That is God's call to us - simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.

There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.

Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything.

Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love.

We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.

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.

Today will never come again.

October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.

We must slow down to a human tempo and we'll begin to have time to listen.

Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.

Take more time, cover less ground.

The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.