Thomas Merton Quotes

The spiritual life is something that people worry about when they are so busy with something else they think they ought to be spiritual. Spiritual life is guilt.
— Thomas Merton

The secular mind is the mind that is lost in forgetfulness of who we are. It is a consciousness of ourselves as we are not.
— Thomas Merton

People are trying to place their hopes in human means that can't succeed. They're not going to succeed. They never have succeeded and they never will succeed.
— Thomas Merton

What you're most likely to fight with the other guy about? And that's it. That's your idol.
— Thomas Merton

The whole thing about vocations is vocations come when God feels that there's something there for them to come toward. And if there's a reason for them not to come they don't come.
— Thomas Merton

...the real problem of our age is the problem of this terrific speed of technological advance with no corosponding advance on any other level. Tremendous development in science and no development whatever in morality or spirituality or anything like that.
— Thomas Merton

Because we have in ourselves this self-will which is of such a nature that when it resists the will of God it is in fact putting itself in a position where it would kill God if it could. This is the nature of self-will. Self-will, when it puts itself against the will of God, is actually putting itself against God Himself. And when a person clings to his own will to the point where he will completely deny the will of God he is actually saying that he would kill God if he could. That's what sin really means.
— Thomas Merton

A theologian without wisdom is useless.
— Thomas Merton

So the thing to do then is pray as much and as realistically and as authetically and as honestly as you can yourself. Not try to pray as if your were Saint Teresa of Ávila, or something, because you're not. But pray up to your own level. Meet your own capacity to pray. Don't be below it all the time. The time that has been given to us is purely and simply time to meet our own capacity to pray and to give God what we are capable of giving him.
— Thomas Merton

Human ascetic and mystical techniques cannot save us from our sins. They keep us far from God, and take us even further from Him because their illusion engenders in us a false confidence and pride. They are centered on man, not on God, they tend to glorify man, not God.
— Thomas Merton