Quotes from Thomas Merton

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!

We are warmed by the fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts.

We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human and visible means, nor rests in any visible end. He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.

The truth that many people never understand is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more your suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things start to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.

See, see Who God is, see the glory of God, going up to Him out of this incomprehensible and infinite Sacrifice in which all history begins and ends, all individual lives begin and end, in which every story is told, and finished, and settled for joy or for sorrow: the one point of reference for all the truths that are outside of God, their center, their focus: Love.

The climate of this prayer is, then, one of awareness, gratitude and a totally obedient love which seeks nothing but to please God.

If you persist in trying To attain what is never attained (It is Tao's gift!) If you persist in making effort To obtain what effort cannot get; If you persist in reasoning About what cannot be understood, You will be destroyed By the very thing you seek.

As soon as you are really alone you are with God.

The whole of life is to spiritualize our activities by humility and faith, to silence our nature by charity.

A saint is not someone who is good but someone who experiences the goodness of God.

Hence monastic prayer, especially meditation and contemplative prayer, is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him whom we have found, who loves us, who is near to us, who comes to us to draw us to himself.

This time is given to me by God that I may live in it. It is not given to make something out of it, but given me to be stored away in eternity as my own.