Thomas Merton Quotes

I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.

Calamity is the perfect glass wherein we truly see and know ourselves.

Never be afraid to sit a while and think.

Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.

Maybe I don't need a relationship after all, she thought. Maybe thinking about these conversations was just as good as having them. She could sit in her Honda in the dark and experience whatever kind of life she wanted. Sometimes you think, Hey, maybe there's something else out there. But there really isn't. This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.

The human mind has to ask "Who, what, whence, whither, why am I?" And it is very doubtful if the human mind can answer any of these questions.

I do think it’s only by stopping movement that you can see where to go. And it’s only by stepping out of your life and the world that you can see what you most deeply care about… and find a home.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

He felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance, finds what he was seeking at his very feet. All his life he had been looking over the heads of those around him, while he had only to look before him without straining his eyes. p 1320

We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.

In the best writers, the outward-reaching interest in the 'found subject' leads back at a hairpin to some uncomfortable inner recognition that the writer has journeyed very far to see; he comes home half-dead.

All confessions are Odysseys.

I think of myself as being a relatively intelligent man who is open to a lot of different things and I think that questioning our purpose in life and the meaning of existence is something that we all go through at some point.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

This taught me a lesson, but I'm not quite sure what it is.

We have learned how to do a lot of things. We must try to relearn why.

I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me.

There are places and moments in which one is so completely alone that one sees the world entire.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

We can't give the truth to someone as an object, we can only point to it, inviting inspection. It is in that spirit that we can hear or read a teaching and then look at our own lives, at our own experiences to see whether anything might have been revealed about them.

I realized that I had to be honest about where I was, where I was coming from, and what I was trying to do.

It was difficult for me because I was searching for the answer for so long, and the answer was right in front of me. Do what I do best.

The more I talk about things, the more I understand myself.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.