Thomas Merton Quotes - Page 18

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• No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Writing, Wind

  Thomas Merton (2015). “Charter, Customs, and Constitutions of the Cistercians: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 7”, p.10, Liturgical Press

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• The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive of perception.

  Thomas Merton

  Mystical Experiences, Perception, Artistic

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

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• What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe.

  Thomas Merton

  Pants, Praying, Breathe

  "Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings".

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• Be still: There is no longer any need of comment. It was a lucky wind That blew away his halo with his cares, A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.

  Thomas Merton

  Wind, Sea, Lucky

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

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• The logic of the poet - that is, the logic of language or the experience itself - develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.

  Thomas Merton

  Way, Logic, Language

  "The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton". Book by Thomas Merton, 1959.

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• Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, the perfection of His love.

  Thomas Merton

  Perfection, His Love, Unlimited

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.434, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist....It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Responsibility, Unique

  Nicki Verploegen Vandergrift, Thomas Merton (1995). “Meditations with Merton”, Triumph Books

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• One opens the inner doors of one's heart to the infinite silences of the Spirit, out of whose abysses love wells up without fail and gives itself to all.

  Thomas Merton

  Heart, Doors, Giving

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• Since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to be affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs.

  Thomas Merton

  Destiny, Men, Hands

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• People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Ideas, People

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.281, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Consequently, the truth of God lives in our souls more by the power of superior moral courage than by the light of an eminent intelligence. Indeed, spiritual intelligence itself depends on the fortitude and patience with which we sacrifice ourselves for the truth, as it is communicated to our lives concretely in the providential will of God

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Wisdom, Sacrifice

  Thomas Merton (2002). “No Man Is an Island”, p.160, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place … It is certainly part of my life of prayer.

  Thomas Merton

  Prayer, Weather, Climate

  Thomas Merton, Victor A. Kramer (1996). “Turning toward the world: the pivotal years”, Harper San Francisco

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• True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Clever, Grace

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Contemplative Prayer”, p.70, Image

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• 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.

  Thomas Merton

  Hate, Heart, Love Is

  "The Nonviolent Alternative".

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• Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one's own-be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid.

  Thomas Merton

  Home, Mean, Offering

  Thomas Merton (1979). “Love and Living”, p.6, Macmillan

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• Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which... are just the opposite of what we were made for?

  Thomas Merton

  Opposites, Want, Waste

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.132, Shambhala Publications

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

  Thomas Merton

  Thinking, People, Lazy

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

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• The things I thought were so important -- because of the effort I put into them -- have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.

  Thomas Merton

  Effort, Important, Able

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

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• The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.

  Thomas Merton

  Way, Mercy, Contradiction

  Thomas Merton (2015). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.148, Sounds True

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• We know when we are following our vocation when our soul is set free from preoccupation with itself and is able to seek God and even to find Him, even though it may not appear to find Him. Gratitude and confidence and freedom from ourselves: these are signs that we have found our vocation and are living up to it even though everything else may seem to have gone wrong. They give us peace in any suffering. They teach us to laugh at despair. And we may have to.

  Thomas Merton

  Gratitude, Giving, Laughing

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.147, Shambhala Publications

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• Our thought should not merely be an answer to what someone else has just said. Or what someone else might have said. Our interior world must be more than an echo of the words of someone else. There is no point in being a moon to somebody else's sun, still less is there any justification for our being moons of one another, and hence darkness to one another, not one of us being a true sun.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Moon, Echoes

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• We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human and visible means, nor rests in any visible end. He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.

  Thomas Merton

  Mean, Imagination, Trust In God

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

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• Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.

  Thomas Merton

  Death, Wisdom, Heart

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.132, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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.

  Thomas Merton

  Lying, Imagination, Silence

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

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• 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.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Crazy, Book

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