Quotes from Thomas Merton
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.
- Thomas Merton
Prayer is an expression of who we are...We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.
- Thomas Merton
The sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.
- Thomas Merton
What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?
- Thomas Merton
Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.
- Thomas Merton
To be alone by being part of the universe-fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without.
- Thomas Merton
Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.
- Thomas Merton
Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
- Thomas Merton
The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
- Thomas Merton
The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.
- Thomas Merton
Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.
- Thomas Merton
A daydream is an evasion.
- Thomas Merton