Quotes from Thomas Merton
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 own reward.
- Thomas Merton
Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered.
- Thomas Merton
Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good.
- Thomas Merton
If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him.
- Thomas Merton
A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy.
- Thomas Merton
Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast.
- Thomas Merton
Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found.
- Thomas Merton
The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.
- Thomas Merton
I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is.
- Thomas Merton
It is my belief, that we should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in that part of humanity that is most remote from our own.
- Thomas Merton
I can depend less and less on my own power and sense of direction...It is so strange to advance backwards and get where you are going in a totally unexpected way
- Thomas Merton
Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all others.
- Thomas Merton