Thomas Merton Quotes

Kabbalah is all about change. It isn't about being proud of our good qualities: the wisdom is about transforming our darkness into light.

The only thing you're taking out of here is your spirit and your soul, so we need to be conscious to try and develop that part of ourselves, because we're all spiritual creatures.

Don't go to sleep now, for you have been awakened. Don't shut your eyes, or you will put out the light. Stay awake to the power and force that guides and protects your divine essence.

As I lived up to the highest light I had, higher and higher light came to me.

A man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge, for if he does not get knowledge, he will be brought into captivity by some evil power

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious - that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment.

A steady diet of the higher truths might prove exhausting, but it's important that we acknowledge their validity and celebrate their survival.

Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience.

Darkness is the only path to light. It is not our wonderful gifts that make us closer to God: it's using our garbage to transform ourselves. This is the key that unlocks the door that opens to God.

Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument.

There is only one issue: man's lack of experience in feeling his Divine self and his innate connection with the Divine. All other issues stem from this.

Religion is not a burden, not a weight, it is wings.

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

My main calling in life is to seek and achieve spiritual balance, and to express that through my instrument. Everything else is here today, gone later today.

At a certain point, I felt the need to submit to a higher level of religiosity... to move away from my intuition and to accept an ultimate truth. I felt that in order to become a good person, I needed rules - lots of them - or else I would somehow fall apart. I am reclaiming myself. Trusting my goodness and my divine mission.

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.

Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you.

I'm not speaking as someone who has reached satori or anything else. I'm a student.

If you use your mind to look for a Buddha, you won't see the Buddha.

Most importantly, the meaning of spirituality lays the seeds for our destiny and the path we must follow.

I think a spiritual journey is not so much a journey of discovery. It's a journey of recovery. It's a journey of uncovering your own inner nature. It's already there.

Like Yoga, the spiritual life is actually very difficult.

Happy is he who has gained the wealth of divine thoughts, wretched is he whose beliefs about the gods are dark.

I had to find some clarity about approaching life more spiritually. I think I'm kind of dense, and it makes me pull the process into mind and struggle over it in finding the path.