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Thomas Merton Quotes - Page 24

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

In any case, his religious teaching consisted mostly in more or less vague ethical remarks, an obscure mixture of ideals of English gentlemanliness and his favorite notions of personal hygiene. Everybody knew that his

In any case, his religious teaching consisted mostly in more or less vague ethical remarks, an obscure mixture of ideals of English gentlemanliness and his favorite notions of personal hygiene. Everybody knew that his class was liable to degenerate into a demonstration of some practical points about rowing, with Buggy sitting on the table and showing us how to pull an oar.

Wisdom, Religious, Teaching

Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.106, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good.

Mean, Long, Evil

Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.34, Macmillan

Are they moved by a sense of human need for silence, for reflection, for inner seeking? So they want to get away from the noise and tension of modern life, at least for a little while, in order to relax their minds and wills and seek a blessed healing sense of inner unity, reconciliation, integration?

Blessed, Healing, Reflection

Thomas Merton (1979). “Love and Living”, p.44, Macmillan

October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.

College, America, Looks

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

I am willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them - the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings.

Sweet, College, Years

Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.156, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children.

Children, Autumn, Night

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

We must suffer. Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason. It helps think clearly, judge sanely. It strengthens the action of our will.

Eye, Thinking, Giving

"Thoughts in Solitude". Book by Thomas Merton, 1956.

Nonviolence seeks to ‘win’ not by destroying or even by humiliating the adversary, but by convincing [the adversary] that there is a higher and more certain common good than can be attained by bombs and blood. Nonviolence, ideally speaking, does not try to overcome the adversary by winning over [them], but to turn [them] from an adversary into a collaborator by winning [them] over.

Winning, Blood, Trying

Thomas Merton (2010). “The Nonviolent Alternative”, p.192, Macmillan

To become attached to the experience of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love.

Perfect, Soul, Darkness

Thomas Merton (2003). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.214, Shambhala Publications

Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.

Religious, Consciousness, Form

Thomas Merton (2000). “Thoughts On The East”, p.43, A&C Black

Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the "nothing," the "no-body" that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.

Circles, Bird, May

You pray best when the mirror of your soul is empty of every image except the Image of the Invisible Father.

Father, Mirrors, Soul

Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.128, Macmillan

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

Reality, Men, Silence

Love is a special way of being alive.

Love Is, Special, Alive

The lights of prayer that make us imagine we are beginning to be angels are sometimes only signs that we are finally beginning to be men. We do not have a high enough opinion of our own nature. We think we are at the gates of heaven and we are only just beginning to come into our own realm as free and intelligent beings.

Wisdom, Prayer, Angel

Thomas Merton (2002). “The Ascent to Truth”, p.209, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between 'things' and 'God' as if God were another thing and as if creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God.

Spiritual, Mean, Order

Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.21, New Directions Publishing

It seems to me that the darkness that has troubled you ... comes from one very serious source. Without wanting to be in conflict with the truth and with the will of God, we are actually going against God's will and His teaching.

Teaching, Darkness, Serious

Thomas Merton (1995). “Witness to Freedom: The Letters of Thomas Merton in Times of Crisis”, p.182, Macmillan

I am earth, earth My heart's love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected

Flower, Heart, Lakes

Thomas Merton, Lynn Szabo (2005). “In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton”, p.97, New Directions Publishing

For the sinful self is not my real self, it is not the self YOU have wanted for me, only the self that I have wanted : And I no longer want this false self. But now, Father, I come to You in your own Son's self ... and it is He Who Presents me to You.

Father, Real, Son

Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.82, Macmillan

His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept.

Wisdom, Giving, Justice

Thomas Merton (2002). “No Man Is an Island”, p.237, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

God has brought me to Kentucky...the precise place he has chosen for my sanctification.

Kentucky, Chosen, Sanctification

God, have mercy on me in the blindness in which I hope I am seeking You!

Mercy, Blindness, Seeking

Thomas Merton, Lawrence Cunningham (1996). “A search for solitude: pursuing the monk's true life”, Harper San Francisco

Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life.

Christian, Age, Church

Thomas Merton (2003). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.148, Shambhala Publications

O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't.

Love, Heaven, Leave Me Alone

What is 'grace'? It is God's own life, shared by us. God's life is love. Deus caritas est. By grace we are able to share in the infinitely selfless love of Him Who is such pure actuality that He needs nothing and therefore cannot conceivably exploit anything for selfish ends. Indeed, outside of Him there is nothing, and whatever exists exists by His free gift of its being, so that one of the notions that is absolutely contradictory to the perfection of God is selfishness.

Selfish, Free Gifts, Perfection

Thomas Merton (1998). “The seven storey mountain”, Harcourt

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