Thomas Merton Quotes

Seeds of faith are always within us; sometimes it takes a crisis to nourish and encourage their growth.

God, our Creator, has stored within our minds and personalities, great potential strength and ability. Prayer helps us tap and develop these powers.

When I realize I've come through so much, good and bad, because of my relationship with Christ, I can't hide that light within me.

I genuinely believe that being on death row for 22 years ultimately saved my life. It was the greatest adventure of my life, and I survived it.

Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.

You can change. You can 'come unto Christ, and be perfected in him.'

Great saints have often been made out of great sinners, but not one was ever made out of a wimp.

Crippled but free, I was blind all the time I was learning to see.

I had seen these transformations, people who had lost their will to live, coming back from their zombie states and radiating a new life force from their eyes.

Prayer, the basic exercise of the spirit, must be actively practiced in our private lives. The neglected soul of the human being must be made strong enough to assert itself once more. For if the power of prayer is again released and used in the lives of common men and women; if the spirit declares its aims clearly and boldly, there is yet hope that our prayers for a better world will be answered.

Let a man go down as low as possible; there must come a time when out of sheer desperation he will take an upward curve and will learn to have faith in himself.

Yet I know that good is coming to me—that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good. And so, FAREWELL.

The power of growth, of improvement, the power to overcome all stagnation and break through every obstacle and transform a barren wasteland into a verdant field - that unstoppable power of hope resides right within your own heart. It wells up from the rich earth of your innermost being when you face the future without doubt or fear: "I can do more. I can grow. I can become a bigger and better human being."

The spring wakes us, nurtures us and revitalizes us. How often does your spring come? If you are a prisoner of the calendar, it comes once a year. If you are creating authentic power, it comes frequently, or very frequently.

I don't think I have spiritual beliefs in the structured sense - but I believe in the absolute necessity of spirit and a healthy spiritual life. It grew inside me by itself, which is surely the very nature of spirit, and instinctively I protected and nourished it. I also absorbed spirituality by osmosis.

I cannot express to you how grateful I am that I am a Christian. Before I was a Christian, I went through a time in my life where I just didn't know why I was alive.

We are all on a journey of faith, and we have to polish that faith.

I'm still going to make mistakes, but I don't have any problems with publicly professing my faith now. It just took me a long time to get to the right place in my relationship with Christ.

Life delivered me a catastrophe, but I found a richness of soul.

Even in my darkest times I knew I had a good future ahead of me.

Turn your scars into stars.

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.

If, then, faith widens the connections, it elevates the man.

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.