CC-ITMS Quotes

The following Merton quotes are taken from THOMAS MERTON: A LIFE IN LETTERS: The Essential Collection edited by Willam H. Shannon and Christian M. Bochen (HarperOne, 2008):

…It seems to me that, as a contemplative, I do not need to lock myself into solitude and lose all contact with the rest of the world; rather this poor world has a right to a place in my solitude….

…The question of peace is important, it seems to me, and so important that I do not believe anyone who takes his Christian faith seriously can afford to neglect it. I do not mean to say that you have to swim out to Polaris submarines carrying a banner between your teeth, but it is absolutely necessary to take a serious and articulate stand on the question of nuclear war. And I mean against nuclear war….

…The illusion of America as the earthly paradise, in which everyone recovers original goodness: which becomes in fact a curious idea that prosperity itself justifies everything, is a sign of goodness, is a carte blanche to continue to be prosperous in any way feasible: and this leads to the horror that we now see: because we are prosperous, because we are successful, because we have all this amazing “know-how” (without real intelligence or moral wisdom, without even a really deep scientific spirit), we are entitled to defend ourselves by any means whatever, without any limitation, and all the more so because what we are defending is our illusion of innocence…

…It would seem that small contemplative communities are needed which, while preserving jealously their solitude and life of prayer, might also in discreet and limited ways offer opportunities for dialogue and spiritual communication with members of the surrounding society, particularly the intellectual and religious leaders, whether Christian or otherwise. There is a spiritual work of mercy which has almost become a corporal work in our time: offering to others some small share temporarily in the silence and solitude of a monastic setting.

…There is no question that the mystics are the ones who have kept Christianity going, if anyone has….

…The more I see of it, the more I realize the absolute primacy and necessity of silent, hidden, poor, apparently fruitless prayer….

…Did I tell you that I had moved out to the woods? I came out over a month ago. Go down only once a day, for Mass and dinner, then come back. I get a little supper for myself and as I don’t like to bother with cooking or washing dishes I try to keep it as simple as possible. It is really a wonderful life, a revelation, even much better than I expected. It is so good to get back to plain natural simplicity and the bare essentials, no monkeying around with artificialities and non-essentials. It really gives a wonderful new dimension to one’s life. I didn’t realize, until I got out here, how tense and frustrated I really was in community, though of course I love the monks….I like being a hermit, and I do have real solitude. There is never anyone around in the woods expect an occasional hunter, and we are trying to persuade them to go elsewhere. It is real solitude, and just perfect.

…as far as I am concerned the question “why do you have to be a monk?” is like a question “why do you have to live in Nebraska?” I don’t know. It’s what the karma added up to, I guess. Here I am, and it would not be physically easy for me to get somewhere else, but on the other hand I have what I want: a certain amount of distance, silence, perspective, meditation, room to do the things I know I must do. I would go nuts trying to do them in a city. Is this better? Certainly only for someone who knows he has to do it this way, more or less, or something like this. But not necessarily for anyone else. I am sure you are quite right about the ordinary life etc. This is a more ordinary life than you think, and also I wonder if I am more out of life or more in it? To me, the woods are life. Of course there is a lot wrong with it. Certainly it would be wonderful to have children to look after and as you say learn from. But I know for my own part that being married would be a very difficult proposition, much too complicated. Loneliness can be terrible too, but somehow I can handle that better. I’m only saying that is the kind of compromise with life that I have ended up with, and not making out it is wonderful: but it is what I can handle. More or less…

…I am against war, against violence, against violent revolution, for peaceful settlement of differences, for nonviolent but nevertheless radical change. Change is needed, and violence will not really change anything: at most it will only transfer power from one set of bull-headed authorities to another….But the problems of man can never be solved by political means alone. Over and over again the Church has said that the forgetfulness of God and of prayer are at the root of our trouble. This has been reduced to a cliché. But it is nevertheless true. And I realize more and more that in my own vocation what matters is not comment, not statements of opinion, not judgments, but prayer. Let us pray for one another and try in everything to do what God asks of us.

An American Meditation

The attachment of the modern American to his automobile, and the symbolic role played by his car, with its aggressive and lubric design, its useless power, its otiose gadgetry, its consumption of fuel, which is advertised as having almost supernatural power - this is where the study of American mythology should begin.

Meditation on the automobile, what it is used for, what it stands for - the automobile as weapon, as self-advertisement, as brothel, as a means of suicide, etc. - might lead us at once right into the heart of all contemporary American problems: race, war, the crisis of marriage, the flight from reality into myth and fanaticism, the growing brutality and irrationality of American mores. - Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966)

A daydream is an evasion.
Thomas Merton

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
Thomas Merton

Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
Thomas Merton

An author in a Trappist monastery is like a duck in a chicken coop. And he would give anything in the world to be a chicken instead of a duck.
Thomas Merton

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
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

By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
Thomas Merton

Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
Thomas Merton

I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me.
Thomas Merton

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.
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

Men in bowlers and dark suits with their rolled-up umbrellas. Men full of propriety, calm and proud, neat and noble.
Thomas Merton

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.
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

So Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me, and I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom.
Thomas Merton

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.
Thomas Merton

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thomas Merton

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
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 tighter you squeeze, the less you have.
Thomas Merton

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

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
Thomas Merton

There was this shadow, this double, this writer who had followed me into the cloister. He rides my shoulders I cannot lose him.
Thomas Merton

We do not exist for ourselves.
Thomas Merton

We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of men and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us.
Thomas Merton

We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.
Thomas Merton

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
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

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.
Thomas Merton

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

When ambition ends, happiness begins.
Thomas Merton

Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
Thomas Merton