Quotes from Thomas Merton

When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless.

If the deepest ground of my being is love, then in that very love and nowhere else will I find myself, the world, and my brother and sister in Christ. It is not a question of either-or but of all-in-one. It is not a matter of exclusivity and "purity" but of wholeness, wholeheartedness, unity, and of Meister Eckhart's gleichheit (equality) which finds the same ground of love

The tighter you squeeze the less you have.

then you obey my commandments, which I command you this day, that you love the Lord your God and serve Him with all your heart, and with all your soul:

A spirit that is drawn to God in contemplation will soon learn the value of obedience: the hardships and anguish he has to suffer every day from the burden of his own selfishness, his clumsiness, incompetence and pride will give him a hunger to be led and advised and directed by somebody else.

humble realization of our mysterious being as persons in whom God dwells, with infinite sweetness and inalienable power.

to put words together in a such a way that they exercise a mysterious and vital reactivity among themselves, and so release their secret content of associations to produce in the reader an experience that enriches the depths of his spirit in a manner quite unique.

When a hideous man becomes a father And a son is born to him In the middle of the night He trembles and lights a lamp And runs to look in anguish On that child's face To see whom he resembles.

One reason why we are less fervent than we ought to be is that we cripple our own spirit by taking ourselves too seriously. We expect too much from ourselves when we ought to expect everything from God on Whom we utterly depend.

There are different kinds of fear. One of the most terrible is the sensation that you are likely to become, at any moment, the protagonist in a Graham Greene novel: the man who tries to be virtuous and who is, in a certain sense, holy, and yet who is overwhelmed by sin as if there were a kind of fatality about it.

Actually I feel more sure than I ever have in my life that I am obeying the Lord and am on the way He wills for me, though at the same time I am struck and appalled (more than ever!) by the shoddiness of my response.

This "ground," this "world" where I am mysteriously present at once to my own self and to the freedoms of all other men, is not a visible, objective and determined structure with fixed laws and demands. It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself my own unique door.