Thomas Merton Quotes - Page 11

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• The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Dream, Mean

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• 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.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Self, Long

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• I can depend less and less on my own power and sense of direction...It is so strange to advance backwards and get where you are going in a totally unexpected way

  Thomas Merton

  Way, Unexpected, Strange

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• First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find the meaning of life no doubt. But in the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you?

  Thomas Merton

  Responsibility, Destiny, Men

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.12, Shambhala Publications

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• But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God's love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God.

  Thomas Merton

  Men, Mercy Of God, May

  Thomas Merton (2002). “No Man Is an Island”, p.228, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.

  Thomas Merton

  Men, World, Way

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• The biggest human temptation is... to settle for too little.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Temptation, Simple Life

  Forbes, August 4, 1980.

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• By my monastic life and vows I am saying no to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, the staged political trials, the judicial murders, the racial injustices, the economic tyrannies, and the whole socioeconomic apparatus which seems geared for nothing but global destruction in spite of all its fair words in favor of peace.

  Thomas Merton

  Political, Trials, Favors

  Thomas Merton (2015). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.134, Sounds True

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• Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Light, Gods Will

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.30, Shambhala Publications

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• Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation.

  Thomas Merton

  Technology, Temptation, Spirituality

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”, p.18, Image

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• Duty does not have to be dull. Love can make it beautiful and fill it with life.

  Thomas Merton

  Beautiful, Doe, Dull

  Thomas Merton (2002). “The Sign of Jonas”, p.298, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book.

  Thomas Merton

  Love, Book, Evil

  Thomas Merton (2002). “The Sign of Jonas”, p.71, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Depth, Action

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• Each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it by His Love and His infinite Art.

  Thomas Merton

  Art, Giving, Individuality

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.30, New Directions Publishing

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• Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

  Thomas Merton

  Love, Inspirational, Family

  "No Man is an Island".

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• A humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact, he is not afraid of anything, even himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God.

  Thomas Merton

  Humility, Humble, Men

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.190, New Directions Publishing

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• 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

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Mean, Essence

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

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• We cannot possess the truth fully until it has entered into the very substance of our life by good habits, and by a certain perfection of moral activity.

  Thomas Merton

  Perfection, Substance, Moral

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• The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68

  Thomas Merton

  Liberty, Causes, Destruction

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• I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within.

  Thomas Merton

  Kindness, Real, Thinking

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• Imagination has the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new.

  Thomas Merton

  Art, Light, Imagination

  Thomas Merton (1998). “Contemplation in a World of Action: Second Edition, Restored and Corrected”, p.178, University of Notre Dame Pess

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• When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Needs, World

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• What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?

  Thomas Merton

  Prayer, Use, Answers

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.39, Macmillan

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• Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.

  Thomas Merton

  Christian, Religious, Humility

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.73, Macmillan

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• Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.

  Thomas Merton

  True Relationship, Illusion, Contemplative

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