Inspirational Quotes by Thomas Merton

“The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.”

“It was simply the deep, almost subconscious aversion from the vague and evil thing, which I called Catholicism, which lived back in the dark corners of my mentality with the other spooks, like death and so on. I did not know precisely what the word meant. It only conveyed a kind of a cold and unpleasant feeling. The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down the spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.”

“Father,” I answered, “I want to give God everything.”

“Had I ever read the Life of St. Bernard by Dom Ailbe Luddy?—”

“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”

“instead of becoming a strong and ardent and generous Catholic, I simply slipped into the ranks of the millions of tepid and dull and sluggish and indifferent Christians who live a life that is still half animal, and who barely put up a struggle to keep the breath of grace alive in their souls.”

“The Breviary was hard to learn, and every step was labor and confusion, not to mention the mistakes and perplexities I got myself into. However,”

“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.”

“Después del latín, me parece que no hay lengua tan apropiada para la oración y para hablar de Dios como el español, pues es una lengua a la vez fuerte y ágil, tiene su precisión, tiene en sí la cualidad del acero, que le da la exactitud que necesita el verdadero misticismo y, empero, es suave, también, gentil y flexible, lo que requiere la devoción, es cortés, suplicante y galante; se presta, de modo sorprendente, muy poco a la sentimentalidad. Tiene algo de la intelectualidad del francés, pero no la frialdad que la intelectualidad toma en el francés; nunca desborda en las melodías femeninas del italiano. El español no es nunca un idioma débil, nunca flojo, aun en los labios de una mujer.”

“...The more I think of them, the more I realize that I must certainly owe the Privats for more than butter and milk and good nourishing food for my body. I am indebted to them for much more than the kindness and care they showed me, the goodness and the delicate solicitude with which they treated me as their own child, yet without any assertive or natural familiarity.... That was why I was glad of the love the Privats showed me, and was ready to love them in return. It did not burn you, it did not hold you, it did not try to imprison you in demonstrations, or trap your feet in the snares of its interest.”

“Self-will…is not identical to the will of the new creation—to the will which one finds in renouncing oneself, in the unity of the Body of Christ, wherein the canons of the Church make us recognize a common and individual will. Not the properties of an individual nature, but the unique relationship of each being with God—a relationship by the Holy Spirit and realized in grace—is what constitutes the uniqueness of a human person.”8”

“JMJT February 1, 1942. Septuagesima.”

“A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book, even though it may be about the love of God. There are many who think that because they have written about God, they have written good books. Then men pick up these books and say: if the ones who say they believe in God cannot find anything better than this to say about it, their religion cannot be worth much.”

“If you found God with great ease, perhaps it's not God that you have found.”

“People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

“A saint is not someone who is good but someone who experiences the goodness of God.”

“When solitude was a problem, I had no solitude. When it ceased to be a problem I found I already possessed it, and could have possessed it all along.”

“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy”

“Gerçek anlamda derin düşünme; psikolojik bir hile değil, teolojik bir lütuftur.”

“The madman runs to the East and his keeper runs to the East, both are running to the East. Their purposes differ.”