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Thomas Merton Quotes - Page 5

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

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?

Inspirational, Spiritual, Moon

Thomas Merton (2015). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.35, Sounds True

Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.

Wisdom, Book, Love You

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.

God, Kindness, Compassion

Thomas Merton (2015). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.22, Sounds True

The basic problem is not political, it is apolitical and human. One of the most important things to do is to keep cutting deliberately through political lines and barriers and emphasizing the fact that these are largely fabrications and that there is another dimension, a genuine reality, totally opposed to the fictions of politics: the human dimension which politics pretend to arrogate entirely to themselves. This is the necessary first step along the long way toward the perhaps impossible task of purifying, humanizing and somehow illuminating politics themselves.

Cutting, Reality, Long

"The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters".

Contemplation is life itself, fully awake, fully active, and fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source.

Spiritual, Gratitude, Realization

Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.1, New Directions Publishing

As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination.

Spiritual, Self, Long

What we have to be is what we are.

Wisdom

Thomas Merton (1975). “The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton”, p.308, New Directions Publishing

There were only a few shepherds at the first Bethlehem. The ox and the donkey understood more of the first Christmas than the high priests in Jerusalem. And it is the same today.

Christmas, Shepherds, Jerusalem

"Evangelical Sunday School Lesson Commentary 2013-2014". Book by Lance Colkmire, p. 164, January 5, 2012.

The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!

Life, Wisdom, Real

Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.387, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious unity and integrity is wisdom, the mother of us all, "natura naturans." There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness, and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being.

Mother, Nature, Integrity

He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.

Imagination, Trust In God, Possession

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.13, Shambhala Publications

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.

Uplifting, Men, Soul

Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton (2007). “Gandhi on Non-Violence”, p.106, New Directions Publishing

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying [God]. It “consents,” so to speak, to [God's] creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree

Wisdom, Mean, Essence

"New Seeds of Contemplation". Book by Thomas Merton, 1972.

Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am.

Happiness, Ambition, Mindfulness

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

How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city?

Journey, Men, Cities

Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.100, New Directions Publishing

And it is in this darkness, when there is nothing left in us that can please or comfort our own minds, when we seem to be useless and worthy of all contempt, when we seem to have failed, when we seem to be destroyed and devoured, it is then that the deep and secret selfishness that is too close to us for us to identify is stripped away from our souls. It is in this darkness that we find liberty. It is in this abandonment that we are made strong. This is the night which empties us and makes us pure.

Strong, Night, Soul

We are already ONE. We just think we are separate.

Thinking

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.

Real, Decisions You Make, Self

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.25, Shambhala Publications

My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear.

Spiritual, Goal, One Day

Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.

Love, Valentines Day, Care

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.3, Shambhala Publications

Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God.

Faith, Inspiration, Men

Thomas Merton (1966). “Raids on the Unspeakable”, p.6, New Directions Publishing

We stumble and fall constantly, even when we are most enlightened.

Courage, Fall, Enlightened

Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.53, Macmillan

Paradoxically, I have found peace because I have always been dissatisfied. My moments of depression and despair turn out to be renewals, new beginnings. If I were once to settle down and be satisfied with the surface of life, with its divisions and its cliches, it would be time to call in the undertaker... So, then, this dissatisfaction which sometimes used to worry me and has certainly, I know, worried others, has helped me in fact to move freely and even gaily with the stream of life.

Moving, New Beginnings, Worry

Thomas Merton (2008). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation: Easyread Large Bold Edition”, p.90, ReadHowYouWant.com

Perhaps I am stronger than I think.

Strength, Being Strong, Confidence

Thomas Merton (2009). “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”, p.143, Image

The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.

Wisdom, Pain, Fall

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.92, Shambhala Publications

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