Thomas Merton Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Thomas Merton Quotes. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Thomas Merton Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for ‘finding himself.’ If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.

Thomas Merton

When ambition ends, happiness begins.

Thomas Merton

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

Thomas Merton

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

Thomas Merton

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.

Thomas Merton

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.

Thomas Merton

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

Thomas Merton

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.

Thomas Merton

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.

Thomas Merton

Attachment to spiritual things is… just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else.

Thomas Merton

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.

Thomas Merton

We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.

Thomas Merton

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Thomas Merton

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

Thomas Merton

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.

Thomas Merton

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

Thomas Merton

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.

Thomas Merton

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.

Thomas Merton

A daydream is an evasion.

Thomas Merton

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

Thomas Merton

We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others.

Thomas Merton

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

Thomas Merton

Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.

Thomas Merton

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.

Thomas Merton