The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.
– Thomas Merton
Suffering
I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
– Thomas Merton
Fear | God
There were only a few shepherds at the first Bethlehem. The ox and the donkey understood more of the first Christmas than the high priests in Jerusalem. And it is the same today.
– Thomas Merton
Christmas
By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
– Thomas Merton
Scripture | Nature | Renewal
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
Peace
Be good; keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.
– Thomas Merton
Christ | The Heart | Joy
To be risen with Christ means not only that one has a choice and that one may live by a higher law – the law of grace and love – but that one must do so. The first obligation of the Christian is to maintain their freedom from all superstitions, all blind taboos and religious formalities, indeed from all empty forms of legalism.
– Thomas Merton
Grace | Legalism | Choices
As long as I am content to know that He is infinitely greater than I, and that I cannot know Him unless He shows Himself to me, I will have Peace, and He will be near me and in me, and I will rest in Him.
– Thomas Merton
Peace | Rest
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
Love | Rewards
We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.
– Thomas Merton
Rebellion
The whole Christian life is a life in which the further a person progresses, the more he has to depend directly on God. The more we progress, the less we are self-sufficient. The more we progress, the poorer we get so that the man who has progressed most, is totally poor – he has to depend directly on God. He’s got nothing left in himself.
– Thomas Merton
Life | Grace
My life is a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though I were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the love and protection of Him who guides me.
– Thomas Merton
Life | Love | God
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
Love
To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.
– Thomas Merton
Hell
There is not a flower that opens, not a seed that falls into the ground and not an ear of wheat that nods on the end of its stalk in the wind that does not preach and proclaim the greatness and the mercy of God to the whole world.
– Thomas Merton
Mercy
The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God’s mercy to me.
– Thomas Merton
Mercy
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
Life
Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.
– Thomas Merton
Life
Our knowledge of God is paradoxically not of him as the object of our scrutiny, but of ourselves as utterly dependent on his saving and merciful knowledge of us. It is in proportion, as we are known to him that we find our real being and identity in Christ. We know him in and through ourselves in so far as his truth is the source of our being and his merciful love is the very heart of our life and existence.
– Thomas Merton
God | Mercy | Christ | Identity
Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.
– Thomas Merton
Pride | Humility
We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to “like” one another.
– Thomas Merton
Love
Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him requires a lot of courage and know-how.
– Thomas Merton
Contentment | God
The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.
– Thomas Merton
God | Truth