Thomas Merton Quotes

Thomas Merton Quotes.

I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other

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
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
We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.
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
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
And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.
Thomas Merton
Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn't alread

Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn’t already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
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
Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.
Thomas Merton
Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
Thomas Merton
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.
Thomas Merton
The tighter you squeeze, the less you have.
Thomas Merton
The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to

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