In this section, we collected Thomas Merton Quotes. He was better known by his moniker Father Louis, who was an American priest, Catholic thinker, and Trappist monk who rose to fame as a renowned Catholic writer. In 1915, he was born in France, but his family immigrated to the United States the following year and lived in New York. Merton was not just a renowned Catholic thinker and writer, but also a well-known social activist and a passionate comparative religion scholar. Merton was ordained as a priest in 1949, and he was known as Father Louis after that.
However, it was as a writer of spiritual writings that he became most well-known, and he left a legacy of over 70 works. His most well-known work, ‘The Seven Story Mountain,’ was released in 1948 and was named one of the top 100 non-fiction books by ‘National Review.’ The book was so successful that it motivated many Americans, particularly youths, to seek spiritual advancement in monasteries. Here are some of Thomas Merton’s most renowned statements from his life and works, the man who popularized spirituality. Read on for a compilation of Thomas Merton’s ideas, statements, and sayings that are sure to elevate your spirits and lead you through the hour of tide.
It is incumbent on every generation to pay its debts as it goes. A principle that if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
Mankind is miss disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
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It is error alone that needs the support of the government. Truth can stand by itself.
If God is just, I tremble for my country.
Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation which give you happiness.
Don’t talk about what you have done or what you are going to do.
Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.
Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, religion, in philosophy, as a cause for withdrawing from a friend.
Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.
Thomas Merton Quotes On Life
The glow of one warm thought is to be worth more than money.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.
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Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
No occupation is as delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.
When angry count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred.
The care for human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
Never spend your money before you have earned it.
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.
I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing well to another.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because the law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
Thomas Merton Quotes on Faith
You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith, and hope.
To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us – and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him. Gratitude, therefore, takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder, and is to praise the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.
We too often forget that faith is a matter of questioning and struggle before it becomes one of certitude and peace. You have to doubt and reject everything else to believe firmly in Christ, and after you have begun to believe, your faith itself must be tested and purified. Christianity is not merely a set of foregone conclusions. Faith tends to be defeated by the burning presence of God in mystery, and seeks refuge from him, flying to comfortable social forms and safe convictions in which purification is no longer an inner battle but a matter of outward gesture.
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Reason is the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.
We do not exist for ourselves.
The fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the wind, and join in the general Dance.
Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God.
God must be allowed the right to speak unpredictably… We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend. We must find him in the pagan or we will lose him in ourselves substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction.
The biggest disease in North America is busyness.
Thomas Merton Quotes about Love
Love is a powerful emotion that a person might feel. It’s when you get fond of someone or something. Read on to discover more of Thomas Merton’s love quotes.
The beginning of love is to let those we love to be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our image.
Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its reward.
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.
Duty does not have to be dull. Love can make it beautiful and fill it with life.
The beginning of love is the will to let those we love to be perfectly themselves.
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My life is a mystery that does not attempt to understand, as though I 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.
Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.
Prayer and love are really in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.
For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another.
The logic of the poet — that is, the logic of language or the experience itself — develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.
Fear narrows the little entrance of our hearts. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves.
But precisely this illusion that everything is ‘clear’ is what is blinding us all. It is a serious temptation, and it is a subtle form of pride and worldly love of power and revenge.
We love the things we pretend to laugh at.
To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason.
Thomas Merton Quotes Happiness
Perhaps I am stronger than I think.
Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, and being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.
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.
Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
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Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace, and your soul in the joy of Christ.
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our image. Otherwise, we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thomas Merton Quotes On Education
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 catalog looks wonderful.
The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.
If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace, and your soul in the joy of Christ.
A daydream is an evasion.
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We do not exist for ourselves.
Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.
Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its reward.
Violence is essentially wordless, and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.
Thomas Merton Quotes On Peace
Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.
When ambition ends, happiness begins.
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but balance, order, rhythm, and harmony.
Advertising treats all products with reverence and seriousness due to sacraments.
The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God’s mercy to me.
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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.
Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace, and your soul in the joy of Christ.
A daydream is an evasion.
Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.
The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
Thomas Merton Quotes On Prayer
Thomas Merton was a devout Christian. Read on to discover some of Thomas Merton’s religious phrases that properly characterize life.
The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.
Christ is born to us today, so that he may appear to the whole world through us.
True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our clever use of spiritual techniques.
Attachment to spiritual things is… just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else.
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.
If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. Life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.
Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.
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In Silence, God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.
When you see God in everyone, then they see God in you.
Every breath we draw is a gift of God’s love; every moment of existence is a grace.
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.
The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.
There is in every intellect a natural exigency for a true concept of God: we are born with the thirst to know and to see Him, and therefore it cannot be otherwise.
The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God’s mercy to me.
