Quotes about Thomas Merton

I have come to think that care of the soul requires a high degree of resistance to the culture around us, simply because that culture is dedicated to values that have no concern for the soul.

At Cincinnati, where we arrived about dawn, I asked the Traveller's Aid girl the name of some Catholic churches, and got in a taxi to go to St. Francis Xavier's, where

I, who had always been anti-naturalistic in art, had been a pure naturalist in the moral order. No wonder my soul was sick and torn apart: but now the bleeding wound was drawn together by the notion of Christian virtue, ordered to the union of the soul with God.

The opposite of sloth is not 'activity' or industriousness in a business sense. It is fortitude - including patience and long-suffering.

The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.

I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery.

Love in fact is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions.

The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.

Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God.