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Thomas Merton Quotes about Wisdom

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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

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.

Love, Spiritual, Wisdom

Thomas Merton (1976). “The Power and Meaning of Love”

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds

Wisdom, Emotional, Mind

Thomas Merton (2009). “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”, p.72, Image

For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.

Wisdom, Destiny, Want

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.138, Shambhala Publications

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.

Love, Life, Wisdom

Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.60, New Directions Publishing

Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

Wisdom, Struggle, Reality

"A Poetic Hope" by Cassidy Hall, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 8, 2017.

Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.

Wisdom, Ideas

Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.15, New Directions Publishing

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.

Inspirational, Wisdom, Fake People

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.119, Shambhala Publications

Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.

Wisdom, Men, Risk

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.21, Shambhala Publications

And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.

Wisdom, Communication, Levels

"The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters".

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. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.

Wisdom, Hurt, Insignificant Things

Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.116, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.

Wisdom, Violence, Cease

Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.129, Macmillan

A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.

Life, Wisdom, Men

Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.99, Macmillan

We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.

Wisdom, True Life, Life Is

Thomas Merton (2008). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.35, Sounds True

A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.

Wisdom, Men, Succeed

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.133, Shambhala Publications

Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.

Wisdom, Book, Love You

What we have to be is what we are.

Wisdom

Thomas Merton (1975). “The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton”, p.308, New Directions Publishing

The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!

Life, Wisdom, Real

Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.387, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying [God]. It “consents,” so to speak, to [God's] creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree

Wisdom, Mean, Essence

"New Seeds of Contemplation". Book by Thomas Merton, 1972.

The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.

Wisdom, Pain, Fall

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.92, Shambhala Publications

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

Wisdom, Passion, Order

Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.173, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.

Wisdom, Sadness, Reality

Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, New Directions Publishing

The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable

Spiritual, Wisdom, Grace

Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.129, Macmillan

There are days when I am convinced that Heaven starts already, now, in this ordinary life just as it is, in all its incompleteness, yet, this is where Heaven starts.. see within yourself, if you can find it. I walked through the field in front of the house, lots of swallows flying, everywhere! Some very near me..it was magical. "We are already one, yet we know it not.

Wisdom, Heaven, House

The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.

Wisdom, Atheist, Real

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.213, Shambhala Publications

Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.

Spiritual, Wisdom, Worry

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.13, Shambhala Publications

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