Thomas Merton Quotes

October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.

I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery.

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for ‘finding himself.’ If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.

Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.

Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.

People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.

We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others.

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.

Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn’t already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.