Quotes About Thomas Merton

These paradoxes, these Whitmanesque multitudes, helped make Thomas Merton one of the protean figures of twentieth-century Catholicism. His open and honest 1948 memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain, which details his journey to the Trappist monastery, was a publishing phenomenon that even the savvy Merton was unable to foresee. It introduced contemplative prayer to millions of readers and heralded a postwar renewal in monastic life in the United States.

The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.

Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God.

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.

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

On Pride: This sickness is most dangerous when it succeeds in looking like humility. When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless.

The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meaning and signs of the outer pilgrimage, one can have one without the other. It's best to have both. —Thomas Merton, 1964

I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery.

We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation

Many books have been written on Thomas Merton already.

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68

The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable

But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others.

The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. p. 22

Some men turn away from all this cheap emotion with a kind of heroic despair…But this too can be an error. For if our emotions really die in the desert, our humanity dies with them.

It is a terrible thing to think of the grace that is wasted in this world

Songs of Innocence

Since I know only a few Chinese characters, I obviously am not a translator. These "readings" are then not attempts at faithful reproduction but ventures in personal and spiritual interpretation.

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. (p. 1)

The thing that made Communism seem so plausible to me was my own lack of logic which failed to distinguish between the reality of the evils which Communism was trying to overcome and the validity of its diagnosis and the chosen cure.

he had communicated to me without words an interior light from God, about the condition of my own soul—although I wasn't even sure I had a soul.

Neither of my parents suffered from the little spooky prejudices that devour the people who know nothing but automobiles and movies and what's in the ice-box and what's in the papers and which neighbors are getting a divorce.

The only answer to the problem is grace, grace, docility to grace. I was

Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.