Thomas Merton

When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable.

Ash Wednesday is full of joy...The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust.

The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.

What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.

In the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong.

Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life.

Love is not a mere emotion or sentiment. It is the lucid and ardent responses of the whole person to a value that is revealed to him as perfect.

There were only a few shepherds at the first Bethlehem. The ox and the donkey understood more of the first Christmas than the high priests in Jerusalem. And it is the same today.

What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?

Business is not the supreme virtue, and sanctity is not measured by the amount of work we accomplish. Perfection is found in the purity of our love for God, and this pure love is a delicate plant that grows best where there is plenty of time for it to mature

I came with the notion of perhaps saying something for monks and to monks of all religions because I am supposed to be a monk. ... My dear brothers, WE ARE ALREADY ONE. BUT WE IMAGINE THAT WE ARE NOT. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are

What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe.

One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us.

We do not pray for the sake of praying, but for the sake of being heard. We do not pray in order to listen to ourselves praying but in order that God may hear us and answer us. Also, we do not pray in order to receive just any answer: it must be God's answer.

Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, the perfection of His love.

The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith.

The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.

Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a savior.

Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.

Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty.

The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.