Whose silence are you? — Thomas Merton

The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude. — Thomas Merton

To be alone by being part of the universe–fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without. — Thomas Merton

In Silence God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience. — Thomas Merton

But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. — Thomas Merton

Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm. — Thomas Merton

May we all grow in grace and peace and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us. — Thomas Merton

If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest God, does not bless our work. — Thomas Merton

One opens the inner doors of one’s heart to the infinite silences of the Spirit, out of whose abysses love wells up without fail and gives itself to all. — Thomas Merton

I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and happening, and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it. — Thomas Merton

In a world of noise, confusion and conflict it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace. In such places love can blossom. — Thomas Merton

If you have love you will do all things well. — Thomas Merton

The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him. — Thomas Merton

Love is a special way of being alive. — Thomas Merton

Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty. — Thomas Merton

The only unhappiness is not to love God. — Thomas Merton

Love is our true destiny. — Thomas Merton

Love not only prefers the good of another to my own, but it does not even compare the two. — Thomas Merton

Love is its own reward. — Thomas Merton

Love is the door to eternity. — Thomas Merton

To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything. — Thomas Merton

Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say. — Thomas Merton

Love is an intensification of life. — Thomas Merton

Love is perfect in proportion to it’s freedom. — Thomas Merton

We love the things we pretend to laugh at. — Thomas Merton

In the spiritual life there is no such thing as an indifference to love or hate. — Thomas Merton

Love winter when the plant says nothing. — Thomas Merton

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. — Thomas Merton

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves. — Thomas Merton

A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book. — Thomas Merton

To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God. — Thomas Merton

We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to ‘like’ one another. — Thomas Merton

Duty does not have to be dull. Love can make it beautiful and fill it with life. — Thomas Merton

Every breath we draw is a gift of God’s love; every moment of existence is a grace. — Thomas Merton

The great thing, and the only thing, is to adore and praise GOD. — Thomas Merton

To worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell. — Thomas Merton

The end of the world will be legal. — Thomas Merton

If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world. — Thomas Merton

It is not possible to be intimate with more than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common. — Thomas Merton

I find I serve the world best by keeping my distance and freedom. — Thomas Merton

One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. — Thomas Merton

Christ is born to us today, in order that he may appear to the whole world through us. — Thomas Merton

On the last day of January 1915, in the second year of the Great War, down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into this world. — Thomas Merton

Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves. — Thomas Merton

The whole world has risen in Christ… If God is ‘all in all,’ then everything is in fact paradise, because it is filled with the glory and presence of God, and nothing is any more separated from God. — Thomas Merton

When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well. — Thomas Merton

The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet. — Thomas Merton

The evil in the world is all of our own making, and it proceeds entirely from our ruthless, senseless, wasteful, destructive, and suicidal neglect of our own being. — Thomas Merton

In the end, it’s the reality of personal realtionships that save everything. — Thomas Merton

Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part and a member of mankind. — Thomas Merton

Lovely morning! How lovely life can be! — Thomas Merton

The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives. — Thomas Merton

A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair. — Thomas Merton

You are certainly one of the joys of life for all who have ever come within a mile of you. — Thomas Merton

Our real journey in life is interior. — Thomas Merton

If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. — Thomas Merton

I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place … It is certainly part of my life of prayer. — Thomas Merton

Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision–the only decision that matters. — Thomas Merton

Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it. — Thomas Merton

But any fool knows that you don’t need money to get enjoyment out of life. — Thomas Merton

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone–we find it with another. — Thomas Merton

The meaning of life is found in openness to being and ‘being present’ in full awareness. — Thomas Merton

Contemplation is the loving sense of this life, this presence and this eternity. — Thomas Merton

Infinite sharing is the law of God s inner life. — Thomas Merton

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

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the other…. The whole purpose of life is to live by love. — Thomas Merton

The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living. — Thomas Merton

The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God’s mercy to me. — Thomas Merton

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

It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God. — Thomas Merton

Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire. — Thomas Merton

There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy–bitsy statues. — Thomas Merton

The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places. — Thomas Merton

Love triumphs, at least in this life, not by eliminating evil once for all, but by resisting and overcoming it anew every day. — Thomas Merton

Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. — Thomas Merton

Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. — Thomas Merton

Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked. — Thomas Merton

We stumble and fall constantly even when We are most enlightened. but when We are in true spiritual darkness, We do not even know that We have fallen. — Thomas Merton

Meditation is one of the ways in which the spiritual man keeps himself awake. — Thomas Merton

True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques. — Thomas Merton

My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear. — Thomas Merton

This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality, consists not in getting rid of the self but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first. — Thomas Merton

The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay. — Thomas Merton

Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God. — Thomas Merton

Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains. — Thomas Merton

The religious answer is not really religious if it’s not fully real. Evasion is the answer of superstition. — Thomas Merton

We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God. — Thomas Merton

Peace 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. — Thomas Merton

The God of peace is never glorified by human violence. — 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. — Thomas Merton

There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him. — Thomas Merton

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. — Thomas Merton

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs; activism and overwork. — Thomas Merton

In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart. — Thomas Merton

The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence–it is unshakeable. — Thomas Merton

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. — Thomas Merton

I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude–to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face. — Thomas Merton

As long as I am content to know that He is infinitely greater than I, and that I cannot know Him unless He shows himself to me, I will have Peace, and He will be near me and in me, and I will rest in Him. — Thomas Merton

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

Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. — Thomas Merton

We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it. — Thomas Merton

The artist should preach nothing–not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth–moral, metaphysical, mystical. — Thomas Merton

The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer. — Thomas Merton

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 truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe. — Thomas Merton

The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth. — Thomas Merton

The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear. — Thomas Merton