Quotes by Thomas Merton

About Thomas Merton:

Thomas Merton was an American Catholic writer and mystic. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, he was a poet, social activist, and student of comparative religion. In 1949, he was ordained to the priesthood and given the name Father Louis.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.

Thomas Merton

Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.

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

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

Thomas Merton
Life quotes by Thomas Merton, Inspirational quotes by Thomas Merton, UberQuotes

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.

Thomas Merton

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.

Thomas Merton

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

Thomas Merton

The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.

Thomas Merton

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.

Thomas Merton

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.

Thomas Merton

We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.

Thomas Merton

October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.

Thomas Merton

Perhaps I am stronger than I think.

Thomas Merton

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Thomas Merton

How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books.

Thomas Merton

Author Bio

  • NameThomas Merton
  • DescriptionPriest and author
  • BornJanuary 31, 1915
  • DiedDecember 10, 1968
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionTheologian; Poet; Essayist; Autobiographer; Writer