Thomas Merton Quotes

Repentance may begin instantly, but reformation often requires a sphere of years.

By constant contemplation of excellence, we clear our selfhood of all dross and impurities.

Before you can do something, you must first be something.

Before you can do something you must first be something.

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.

The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.

Who you are becoming is more important than what you are accumulating.

True change is within; leave the outside as it is.

We are apt to think that everything that happens to us is to be turned into useful teaching; it is to be turned into something better than teaching, into character. We shall find that the spheres God brings us into are not meant to teach us something but to make us something.

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also - if this isn't too grand a word - our tragedy.

We renovate the heart by, of course, changing it, but we can't do that, really, without changing the other essential parts of the human personality.

The most important task of your life is not what you do, but who you become.

Stay in the spiritual fire. Let it cook you.

The transformation of the world is brought about by the transformation of oneself.

When someone becomes a millionaire, the least important thing is what they have. The most important thing is what they have become.

We have real difficulty here because everyone thinks of changing the world, but where, oh where, are those who think of changing themselves? People may genuinely want to be good, but seldom are they prepared to do what it takes to produce the inward life of goodness that can form the soul. Personal formation into the likeness of Christ is arduous and lifelong.

We're concerned with how things turn out; God seems more concerned with how we turn out.

It’s not what you do – it’s what you are becoming.

The man who is deeply discontented with himself is probably growing fast into the full likeness of Christ.

No man can change himself into anything from sheer reason; he can only change into what he potentially is.

Is it possible, I wonder, for a man to truly change? Or do character and habit form the immovable boundaries of our lives?

The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

Man cannot be transformed from bad to good overnight.

He who has made great moral progress ceases to pray