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Thomas Merton Quotes - Page 6

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

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

Wisdom, Passion, Order

Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.173, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The gate of heaven is everywhere.

Heaven, Gates Of Heaven, Gates

Thomas Merton (2015). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.68, Sounds True

The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.

Wisdom, Sadness, Reality

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

The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical.

Art, Moral, Kind

Thomas Merton, Patrick Hart (1985). “The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton”, p.378, New Directions Publishing

Action is the stream, and contemplation is the spring.

Spring, Catholic, Action

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.73, Shambhala Publications

If it so happened that I had once written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again. If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.

Cost, Care, Shapes

Thomas Merton (2002). “Seeds”

Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.

Giving Up, Self, Doe

Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.33, Macmillan

For power can guarantee the interests of some men but it can never foster the good of man. Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all the others. Only love can attain and preserve the good of all. Any claim to build the security of all on force is a manifest imposture.

Power, Men, Guarantees

Thomas Merton (2010). “The Nonviolent Alternative”, p.213, Macmillan

The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable

Spiritual, Wisdom, Grace

Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.129, Macmillan

There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.

Self, Problem, Existence

Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.36, New Directions Publishing

But it certainly is a wonderful thing to wake up suddenly in the solitude of the woods and look up at the sky and see the utter nonsense of everything including all the solemn stuff given out by professional asses about the spiritual life; and simply to burst out laughing, and laugh and laugh, with the sky and the trees because God is not in words, and not in systems, and not in liturgical movements, and not in "contemplation" with a big "C," or in asceticism or in anything like that, not even in the apostolate.

Spiritual, Laughter, Sky

Thomas Merton (2011). “The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters”, p.35, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By "they" I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.

Real, Rain, Mean

Thomas Merton (1966). “Raids on the Unspeakable”, p.9, New Directions Publishing

We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to "like" one another.

Best Love, Love One Another, Obliged

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.178, Shambhala Publications

A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy.

Happiness, Enough, Bigs

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.1, Shambhala Publications

There are days when I am convinced that Heaven starts already, now, in this ordinary life just as it is, in all its incompleteness, yet, this is where Heaven starts.. see within yourself, if you can find it. I walked through the field in front of the house, lots of swallows flying, everywhere! Some very near me..it was magical. "We are already one, yet we know it not.

Wisdom, Heaven, House

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.

Inspiring, Life Changing, Moon

Thomas Merton (1970). “The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century”, p.11, New Directions Publishing

You must realize that it is the ordinary way of God's dealings with us that our ideas do not work out speedily and efficiently as we would like them to. The reason for this is not only the loving wisdom of God, but also the fact that our acts have to fit into a great complex pattern that we cannot possibly understand. I have learned over the years that Providence is always a whole lot wiser than any of us, and that there are always not only good reasons, but the very best reasons for the delays and blocks that often seem to us so frustrating and absurd.

Block, Years, Ideas

Thomas Merton (2011). “The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters”, p.862, Macmillan

The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.

Wisdom, Atheist, Real

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.213, Shambhala Publications

Teach me to go to the country beyond words and beyond names.

Country, Names, Teach

Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.

Spiritual, Wisdom, Worry

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

After all, what is your personal identity? It is what you really are, your real self. None of us is what he thinks he is, or what other people think he is, still less what his passport says he is. And it is fortunate for most of us that we are mistaken. We do not generally know what is good for us. That is because, in St. Bernard's language, our true personality has been concealed under the 'disguise' of a false self, the ego, whom we tend to worship in place of God.

Real, Thinking, Self

"Thomas Merton: I Have Seen what I was Looking for: Selected Spiritual Writings".

We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it.

Being True, Manifest, Knows

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.198, Shambhala Publications

The grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.

Gratitude, Grateful, Differences

Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.48, Macmillan

The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer

Art, Prayer, Leisure

Thomas Merton, (2013). “Thomas Merton - Spiritual Direction and Meditation”, p.51, Read Books Ltd

Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38

Love, Wisdom, Jesus

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