Thomas Merton Quotes

The song that starts with 'Neene Rama, neene Shama, neene Allah, neene Yesu,' is very profound. It exhorts people to stop looking for god everywhere and to instead look within themselves.

My greatest desire is that I may perceive the God whom I find everywhere in the external world, in like manner also within and inside myself.

To see everything in God and to see God in everything normally takes a lifetime of practice.

One of the values of centering prayer is that you are not thinking about God during the time of centering prayer so you are giving God a chance to manifest. In centering prayer there are moments of peace that give the psyche a chance to realize that God may not be so bad after all. God has a chance to be himself for a change.

The mind is a great gift, but it has to be quieted down in order to feel, hear and see the presence of God.

Only when all images of Earth are hushed and the clamor of the senses be stilled, and the soul has passed beyond thought of self, can the eternal wisdom be revealed to the mystic who seeks that highest communion with the unseen.

Healing is the discovery of the Divinity within.

Nirvana is something within you. It is not an external reality. No god thunders down from the mountaintop. Just as the great mystics in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths all discovered, God is within the self. God is virtually inseparable from ourselves.

Settle yourself in solitude, and you will come upon God in yourself.

He who is persistent will realize God. So try your best to make meditation a regular experience in your life.

When you turn to God you discover He has been facing you all the time.

You should stop searching for phrases and chasing after words. Take the backward step and turn the light inward. Your body-mind of itself will drop off and your original face will appear. If you want to attain just this, immediately practice just this.

You find God the moment you realize that you don't need to seek God

When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. It's a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. It's a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body and our psyche, on to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.

As long as you look for a Buddha somewhere else, you'll never see that your own mind is the Buddha.

Meditation is not to avoid society; it is to look deep to have the kind of insight you need to take action. To think that it is just to sit down and enjoy the calm and peace, is wrong.

I decided years ago that if I'm going to keep teaching contemplation, then the last years of my life should be contemplative.

The great awareness comes slowly, piece by piece. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning. The experience of spiritual power is basically a joyful one.

I found thee not, O Lord, without, because I erred in seeking thee without that wert within.

When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.

You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.

The truth is that you can only come to know God when you give up the past and the future in your mind and merge totally into the now, because God is always here now.

I'm always soul searching on a spiritual level.

Let the inner god that is in each one of us speak. The temple is your body, and the priest is your heart: it is from here that every awareness must begin.

Rajneeshism is creating a Noah's Ark of consciousness, remaining centered exactly in the middle of the cyclone. You can only escape within, and that's what I teach. I do not teach worship of God or any other ritual but only a scientific way of coming to your innermost core.