The Intimate Merton Quotes

“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, The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals – A Spiritual Autobiography of Monastic Wisdom and Global Faith

“Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life. ”
― Thomas Merton, The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals – A Spiritual Autobiography of Monastic Wisdom and Global Faith

“We have found Him, He has found us. We are in Him, He is in us. There is nothing further to look for except for the deepening of this life we already possess. Be content.”
― Thomas Merton, The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals – A Spiritual Memoir of Monasticism, Activism, and the Search for Authentic Spirituality

“Most important of all—man’s creative vocation to prepare, consciously, the ultimate triumph of Divine Wisdom. Man, the microcosm, the heart of the universe, is the one who is called to bring about the fusion of cosmic and historic process in the final invocation of God’s wisdom and love. In the name of Christ and by His power man has a work to accomplish: to offer the cosmos to the Father, by the power of the Spirit, in the Glory of the Word. Our life is a powerful Pentecost in which the Holy Spirit, ever active in us, seeks to reach through our inspired hands and tongues into the very heart of the material world created to be spiritualized through the work of the Church, the Mystical Body of the Incarnate Word of God.”
― Thomas Merton, The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals – A Spiritual Memoir of Monasticism, Activism, and the Search for Authentic Spirituality

“When God tells you of a sickness, it is because He means, at the same time, to provide a remedy. It is the Devil who tells us that we are ill and taunts us for it, reminds us of our helplessness by making us even more helpless.”
― Thomas Merton, The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals – A Spiritual Memoir of Monasticism, Activism, and the Search for Authentic Spirituality

“For a Christian is one whom the world does not know.”
― Thomas Merton, The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals – A Spiritual Memoir of Monasticism, Activism, and the Search for Authentic Spirituality

“I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.”
― Thomas Merton, The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals – A Spiritual Memoir of Monasticism, Activism, and the Search for Authentic Spirituality