Thomas Merton Quotes

He who has realized the Self in the Heart has transcended the dualities and is never perplexed.

Begin within. If it shows up in your life, it's coming to tell you something about you that you're acting like you don't know. Something about yourself, or your relationship with God.

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.

The well of your incompleteness runs deep, but make the effort to look away from yourself and to look toward Him.

First, meditation should be of a negative nature. Think away everything. Analyse everything that comes in the mind by the sheer action of the will. Next, assert what we really are-existence, knowledge, and bliss-being, knowing, and loving.

Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt.'

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.

Our ego never wants to die and it will do anything to prolong its life. But the truth is, we are both spirit and ego and you have to have a balance between the two. Your spirit never dies, but the ego is all about beginnings and ends.

Yes, know thyself: in great concerns or small, be this thy care, for this, my friend, is all.

The test of having ceased to be an idolater is: "When you say 'I', does the body come into your thought or not? If it does, then you are still a worshipper of idols."

Even great travelers of the inner world have got stuck in beautiful experiences, and have become identified with those experiences, thinking, "I have found myself." They have stopped before reaching the final stage where all experiences disappear. Enlightenment is not an experience.

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

Meditation here may think down hours to moments. Here the heart may give a useful lesson to the head and learning wiser grow without his books.

Contemplation and wisdom are highest achievements and man is not totally at home with them.

Prayer gives a man the opportunity of getting to know a gentleman he hardly ever meets. I do not mean his maker, but himself.

The ultimate mystery is one's own self.

What's in your soul is in your soul.

Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.

Your desires and true beliefs have a way of playing blind man's bluff. You must corner the inner facts.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Logotherapy sees the human patient in all his humanness. I step up to the core of the patient's being. And that is a being in search of meaning, a being that is transcending himself, a being capable of acting in love for others.

I see the ups and downs. I see the mistakes I've made. I see a funny person. I see a serious person. I see a diamond. I see the good times. I see the bad times. And I see knowledge of self. I see knowledge of self. I know who I am. When I look in the mirror, I see me.

The knowledge of self is the most important thing, because how are you going to know God if you don't know yourself? How are you going to know anything if you don't know yourself?

What it takes to reach this place I'm speaking about is to be in spirit. You shift who you are away from what you have, what you do, what your reputation is, what people think of you, and all of that ego-based thinking. You shift into the understanding that who you are is a piece of God - who you are is a piece of the source - and when you stay connected to that in your thoughts you inspire others to do the same.

I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting think is the struggle with the self, and the relation with the self, and there is no end to the improvement that can be done there, the discoveries that can be made.