This is a curated selection of Thomas Merton quotes (primarily sourced from publicly available videos, and personally curated by me on my own lifelong learning journey). This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction. Short quotes aren’t a substitute for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Thomas Merton’s books (Amazon).
Page Contents:
- Spiritual Life Quotes
- Solitude & Contemplation Quotes
- Prayer Quotes
- Grace & Compassion Quotes
- Love & Heart Quotes
25 Thomas Merton Quotes on Grace, Prayer, Contemplation, & More
Thomas Merton Quotes on Spiritual Life
“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous.” — Thomas Merton
“Not only Christians encounter God. Every man at some point in his life encounters God, and many who are not Christians have responded to God better than Christians.” — Thomas Merton
“A vocation is not a role, it’s not a part we play. It’s a response to a personal call. God speaks, and we answer.” — Thomas Merton
“There is a dialectic of believing and seeing always going on all the time … One cannot know God as long as one seeks to solve the problem of God. To seek to solve the problem of God is to seek to see one’s own eyes. One cannot see his own eyes because they are that with which he sees. God is the light by which we see—by which we see not a clearly defined object called ‘God’, but everything else in him, everything except him. God is then the seer and the seeing.” — Thomas Merton
“No matter where I take hold of a shred of the unity of God, I hold the whole of it.” — Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton Quotes on Solitude & Contemplation
“Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being.” — Thomas Merton
“You go into solitude in order to cast your care upon the Lord … The solitary life is a life in which you no longer care about anything because God is taking care of everything.” — Thomas Merton
“The contemplative life is the search for peace—not in an abstract exclusion of all outside reality, not in a barren negative closing of the senses upon the world, but in the openness of love. The contemplative life begins with the acceptance of my own self in all my poverty and in my nearness to despair—without evasion—in order to recognize that where God is, there can be no despair … Just simply cultivate this sort of openness to God in a general way … The work that’s involved with a lot of this is just simply meeting a new possibility head-on.” — Thomas Merton
“The contemplative is simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust—that is to say, in the surrender of our own poverty and incompleteness, that we may no longer clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves as if thinking made us exist.” — Thomas Merton
“The contemplative has nothing to tell you except to reassure you and say that if you dare to penetrate your own silence, and dare to advance without fear into the solitude of your own heart, and risk the sharing of that solitude with the lonely other who seeks God with you and through you, then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyond words and beyond explanations—because it is too close to be explained. It is the intimate union in the depths of your own heart of God’s spirit and your own secret inmost self, so that you and he are in all truth one spirit.” — Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton Quotes on Prayer
“We should not divide prayer against the rest of our life … Prayer should be the activity in which we are most ourselves.” — Thomas Merton
“Prayer should be as simple as breathing, as simple as living, as simple as just anything. But, when we make a great issue out of prayer … then it becomes opposed to something else which is not prayer. And, then you get into this break: prayer is something sacred, and then you have other things which are secular, and you have to keep them apart. That’s a confusion. Breathing is neither sacred nor secular, you just breathe. Prayer, too, should be neither sacred nor secular. I don’t regard prayer as a specifically sacred activity. It’s life. It is our life, comes from the very ground of our life.” — Thomas Merton
“Prayer should help us to abandon ourselves, to be not occupied with ourselves, and to attain to a kind of wholeness, a kind of all-around acceptance—acceptance of ourselves, acceptance of the world as it is, acceptance of our religious life as it is … Prayer is the great way of getting ourselves opened up to this attitude of acceptance and availability.” — Thomas Merton
“Prayer aspires to an immediate relationship with God—a face-to-face, unmediated vision of God or relationship with God … In prayer, there is no longer ‘I’ the mediator here and God beyond mediator … The mediator becomes so interiorized in me that he and I are one, and my prayer is therefore his prayer.” — Thomas Merton
“Prayer is not only dialogue with God, it is the communion of our freedom with the ultimate freedom of his infinite spirit. It is the elevation of our limited freedom into the infinite freedom of the divine spirit … Our encounter with God is at the same time the discovery of our own deepest freedom. If we never encounter him, our freedom never fully develops.” — Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton Quotes on Grace & Compassion
“Grace is absolutely the most important reality in our life.” — Thomas Merton
“Grace is the holy spirit living in us, praying in us, working in us, without our knowing about it.” — Thomas Merton
“Grace is the life of the holy spirit in us, and the action of the holy spirit in us.” — Thomas Merton
“Grace is the gift of God—the gift of God giving himself to his creature.” — 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
Thomas Merton Quotes on Love & Heart
“My very existence is the sign that God loves me … The first step in the love of God is being human.” — Thomas Merton
“Everything becomes opaque in proportion as we regard it as an individual object … When you want to know God, you don’t go looking for an object called ‘God’, you cultivate the awareness of love in an awake heart—you keep your heart awake to respond to God by love … The truth that makes us free is not merely a matter of information about God, but the presence in us of a divine person.” — Thomas Merton
“When I came to this monastery where I am, I came in revolt against the meaningless confusion of a life in which there was so much activity, so much pointless movement, so much useless talk, so much superficial and needless stimulation, that I could hardly remember who I was … I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man’s heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and in which one learns that only experience counts.” — Thomas Merton
“When you just grasp onto some simple thing which is the thing that you need to work with now, you are really doing everything that you need to do now … If I do the thing that I have to do now, everything else is taken care of … You do the ordinary, simple things that are around to be done, and as you do them with love, your knowledge of God increases without your realizing it.” — Thomas Merton
“What we’re here for is love. And, what is love? When you love another person, you simply forget yourself and think about the other person … In love, each one forgets himself in order to live in and for the other.” — Thomas Merton
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