A Year with Thomas Merton Quotes

“This time is given to me by God that I may live in it. It is not given to make something out of it, but given me to be stored away in eternity as my own.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“Get warm any way you can, and love God and pray.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“Brilliant, windy day—cold. It is fall. It is the kind of day in October that Pop used to talk about. I thought about my grandfather as I came up through the hollow, with the sun on the bare persimmon trees, and a song in my mouth. All songs are, as it were, one’s last. I have been grateful for life.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“What I need most of all is the grace to really accept God as He gives Himself to me in every situation. “He came unto His own and His own received Him not.” Good Shepherd, You have a wild and crazy sheep in love with thorns and brambles. But please don’t get tired of looking for me! I know You won’t. For You have found me. All I have to do is stay found. April 11, 1948,”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“It seems to me that I have greater peace and am close to God when I am not “trying to be a contemplative,” or trying to be anything special, but simply orienting my life fully and completely towards what seems to be required of a man like me at a time like this.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“The Christian faith enables, or should enable, a man to stand back from society and its institutions and realize that they all stand under the inscrutable judgment of God and that, therefore, we can never give an unreserved assent to the policies, the programs and the organizations of men, or to “official” interpretations of the historic process. To do so is idolatry, the same kind of idolatry that was refused by the early martyrs who would not burn incense to the emperor. The policies of men contain within themselves the judgment and doom of God upon their society, and when the Church identifies her policies with theirs, she too is judged with them—for she has in this been unfaithful and is not truly “the Church.” The power of “the Church” (who is not “the Church” if she is rich and powerful) contains the judgment that “begins at the house of God.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“How crazy it is to be “yourself” by trying to live up to an image of yourself you have unconsciously created in the minds of others.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“I am happy that I can at least want to love God. Perhaps that is all I’ve got, but it is already all that is essential. And He will take care of the rest.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“Man is the image of God and not the shadow of God.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“All quiet. No lights at Boone’s or Newton’s. Cold. Lay in bed and realized what I was: I was happy. Said the strange word happiness and realized that it was there, not as an “it” or object. It simply was. And I was that.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“All this is to say that this silence is Christ’s love for me and bought by His death, and it purifies me in His sufferings and His Blood. I must receive it with compunction and love and reverence, lest His love be in vain.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“St. Eucherius on that sunrise! “Think how much more the splendor of the light will be for us in the future, if it shines upon us so brilliantly now. In what magnificent form will the light shine on eternal things, when it shines so beautifully now on what is passing away!”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“It seems to me that I have greater peace and am close to God when I am not “trying to be a contemplative,” or trying to be anything special, but simply orienting my life fully and completely towards what seems to be required of a man like me at a time like this. I am obscurely convinced that there is a need in the world for something I can provide and that there is a need for me to provide it. True, someone else can do it, God does not need me. But I feel He is asking me to provide it.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“True solitude is a participation in the solitariness of God—Who is in all things. Solitude is not a matter of being something more than other men, except by accident: for those who cannot be alone cannot find their true being and they are less than themselves. Solitude means withdrawal from an artificial and fictional level of being which men, divided by original sin, have fabricated in order to keep peace with concupiscence and death.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“one’s nationality should come to have a meaning in the light of eternity.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“The old and the new. For the “old man,” everything is old: he has seen everything or thinks he has. He has lost hope in anything new. What pleases him is the “old” he clings to, fearing to lose it, but he is certainly not happy with it. And so he keeps himself “old” and cannot change: he is not open to any newness. His life is stagnant and futile. And yet there may be much movement—but change that leads to no change. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. For the “new man” everything is new. Even the old is transfigured in the Holy Spirit and is always new. There is nothing to cling to, there is nothing to be hoped for in what is already past—it is nothing. The new man is he who can find reality where it cannot be seen by the eyes of the flesh—where it is not yet—where it comes into being the moment he sees it. And would not be (at least for him) if he did not see it. The new man lives in a world that is always being created, and renewed. He lives in this realm of renewal and creation. He lives in life. The old man lives without life. He lives in death, and clings to what has died precisely because he clings to it. And yet he is crazy for change, as if struggling with the bonds of death. His struggle is miserable, and cannot be a substitute for life. Thought of these things after Communion today, when I suddenly realized that I had, and for how long, deeply lost hope of “anything new.” How foolish, when in fact the newness is there all the time.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“For me—the betrayal I have to look out for is that which would consist simply in attaching myself to “a cause” that happens to be operating at this time, and getting involved, and letting myself be carried along with it, simply making appropriate noises from time to time, at a distance.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“Over and over again I have to make small decisions here and there, in regard to one or other. Distractions and obsessions are resolved in this way. What the resolution amounts to, in the end: letting go of the imaginary and the absent and returning to the present, the real, what is in front of my nose.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“Possibly, what is required of some of us, and chiefly of me, is a solitary and personal response in the form of nonacquiescence, but quiet, definite and pure.”
― Thomas Merton, A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“Actually I feel more sure than I ever have in my life that I am obeying the Lord and am on the way He wills for me, though at the same time I am struck and appalled (more than ever!) by the shoddiness of my response.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“The grace of Easter is a great silence, an immense tranquility and a clean taste in your soul. It is the taste of heaven, but not the heaven of some wild exaltation. The Easter vision is not riot and drunkenness of spirit, but a discovery of order above all order—a discovery of God and of all things in Him. This is a wine without intoxication, a joy that has no poison in it. It is life without death. Tasting it for a moment, we are briefly able to see and love all things according to their truth, to possess them in their substance hidden in God, beyond all sense. For desire clings to the vesture and accident of things, but charity possesses them in the simple depths of God. If Mass could only be, every morning, what it is on Easter morning! If the prayers could always be so clear, if the Risen Christ would always shine in my heart and all around me and before me in His Easter simplicity! For His simplicity is our feast. This is the unleavened bread which is manna and the bread of heaven, this Easter cleanness, this freedom, this sincerity. Give us always this bread of heaven. Slake us always with this water that we might not thirst forever! This is the life that pours down into us from the Risen Christ, this is the breath of his Spirit, and this is the love that quickens His Mystical Body.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“Our sorry idiot life, our idiot existence, idiot not because it has to be but because it is not what it could be with a little more courage and care.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“All things are yours and you are Christ’s—and Christ is God’s. If we live, we live unto God. If we die, we die unto God—whether we live or die, we are God’s possession.” What more could anyone ask?”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life

“Solitude means withdrawal from an artificial and fictional level of being which men, divided by original sin, have fabricated in order to keep peace with concupiscence and death. But by that very fact the solitary finds himself on the level of a more perfect spiritual society—the city of those who have become real enough to confess and glorify God (that is, life) in the teeth of death.”
― Thomas Merton, Year with Thomas Merton, A: Daily Meditations from His Journals - A Spiritual Guide for Reflection, Gratitude, and Self-Care in the Pursuit of a Mindful Christian Life