Authors:

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Thomas Merton Quotes - Page 17

All Quotes Acceptance Acting Age Ambition Anxiety Art Attitude Awakening Awareness Being Alone Being Single Being Yourself Belief Charity Children Choices Christ Christianity Church College Communication Compassion Consciousness Contemplation Country Courage Creation Darkness Desire Destiny Devil Discipline Doubt Earth Effort Eternity Evil Exercise Failing Faith Freedom Giving Glory God Grace Gratitude Happiness Hate Hatred Heart Heaven Hell Home Humanity Humility Identity Imagination Individuality Inspiration Inspirational Integrity Intuition Jesus Journey Joy Justice Language Liberty Life Logic Loneliness Love Lying Meditation Mercy Mindfulness Moon Overcoming Passion Peace Perfection Poverty Praise Prayer Pride Purpose Rain Reality Reflection Responsibility Risk Sacrifice Silence Simplicity Sin Solitude Sorrow Soul Spirituality Spring Study Suffering Teaching Temptation Today Truth Unconditional Love Understanding Unity Values Violence Vision Waiting War Wisdom Work Out Worry Worship Writing

People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular- and too lazy to think of anything better.

People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular- and too lazy to think of anything better.

Thinking, People, Lazy

Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.98, New Directions Publishing

If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence. Since God cannot be imagined, anything our imagination tells us about Him is ultimately a lie and therefore we cannot know Him as He really is unless we pass beyond everything that can be imagined and enter into an obscurity without images and without the likeness of any created thing.

Lying, Imagination, Silence

Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.131, New Directions Publishing

Day after day I read Freud, thinking myself to be very enlightened and scientific when, as a matter of fact, I was about as scientific as an old woman secretly poring over books about occultism, trying to tell her own fortune, and learning how to dope out the future form the lines in the palm of her hand. I don't know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it.

Wisdom, Crazy, Book

The desire to kill is like the desire to attack another with an ingot of red -hot iron: I have to pick up the incandescent metal and burn my own hand while burning the other. Hate itself is the seed of death in my own heart, while it seeks the death of the other.

Hate, Heart, Love Is

"The Nonviolent Alternative".

I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.

Solitude, Secret, Desire

Thomas Merton (2009). “Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer”, p.51, Harper Collins

Our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. Without wisdom, the apparent opposition of action and contemplation, of work and rest, of involvement and detachment, can never be resolved.

Truth, Intuition, Sake

Thomas Merton (2015). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.49, Sounds True

I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.

Believe, Desire, Doe

Thomas Merton (2009). “Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings”, p.8, Harper Collins

There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.

Wisdom, Contemplative Life, Temptation

Thomas Merton (1998). “Contemplation in a World of Action: Second Edition, Restored and Corrected”, p.176, University of Notre Dame Pess

Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.

Advertising, Treats, Reverence

Thomas Merton (2002). “Seeds”

Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in the smoke of confabulation. There can be no peace on earth without the kind of inner change that brings man back to his "right mind." p. 31

Wisdom, Peace, Men

Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton (2007). “Gandhi on Non-Violence”, p.31, New Directions Publishing

For now, oh my God, it is to You alone that I can talk, because nobody else will understand. I cannot bring any other man on this earth into the cloud where I dwell in Your light, that is, Your darkness, where I am lost and abashed. I cannot explain to any other man the anguish which is Your joy nor the loss which is the Possession of You, nor the distance from all things which is the arrival in You, nor the death which is the birth in You because I do not know anything about it myself and all I know is that I wish it were over - I wish it were begun.

Wisdom, Distance, Loss

Thomas Merton (1974). “A Thomas Merton Reader”, Image

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.

Wisdom, Artist, Saint

Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.98, New Directions Publishing

The least of the work of learning is done in classrooms.

Learning, Done, Classroom

"Love and Living".

The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will.

Wisdom, Prayer, Reality

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.42, Shambhala Publications

The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.

Wisdom, Journey, Acting

Thomas Merton (1999). “Mystics and Zen Masters”, p.92, Macmillan

We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the thing necessary for us-whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need

Missing, Needs, May

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.137, Shambhala Publications

The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis, but first of all by living. For until we have begun to live our prudence has no material to work on. And until we have begun to fail we have no way of working out our success.

Life, Work Out, Analysis

There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves.

Recovery, Creative, Instinct

Thomas Merton (2015). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.52, Sounds True

To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair.

Wisdom, Acknowledge Him, Evil

Thomas Merton (2002). “No Man Is an Island”, p.234, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

What does it mean to know and experience my own “nothingness?” It is not enough to turn away in disgust from my illusions and faults and mistakes, to separate myself from them as if they were not, and as if I were someone other than myself. This kind of self-annihilati on is only a worse illusion, it is a pretended humility which, by saying “I am nothing” I mean in effect “I wish I were not what I am.

Mistake, Mean, Humility

Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.49, Macmillan

Love is...like a spring coming up out of the ground of our own depths. "I am gift." All that I am is something that's given, and given freely. Being doesn't cost anything. There's no price tag, no strings attached.

Love, Spring, Price Tag

... Nothing resembles reality less than the photograph. Nothing resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the limitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality, and of course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the subject; and that is something else again.

Reality, Mind, Shadow

Love is not a mere emotion or sentiment. It is the lucid and ardent responses of the whole person to a value that is revealed to him as perfect.

Love, Perfect, Emotion

Thomas Merton (1998). “Contemplation in a World of Action: Second Edition, Restored and Corrected”, p.26, University of Notre Dame Pess

Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.

Wells

In meditative prayer, one thinks and speaks not only with the mind and lips, but in a certain sense with one's whole being... All good meditative prayer is a conversation of our entire self to God.

Prayer, Thinking, Self

You May Also Like: