Thomas Merton Quotes - Page 19

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• I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.

  Thomas Merton

  Solitude, Secret, Desire

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer”, p.51, Harper Collins

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• Our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. Without wisdom, the apparent opposition of action and contemplation, of work and rest, of involvement and detachment, can never be resolved.

  Thomas Merton

  Truth, Intuition, Sake

  Thomas Merton (2015). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.49, Sounds True

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• There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Contemplative Life, Temptation

  Thomas Merton (1998). “Contemplation in a World of Action: Second Edition, Restored and Corrected”, p.176, University of Notre Dame Pess

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• Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.

  Thomas Merton

  Advertising, Treats, Reverence

  Thomas Merton (2002). “Seeds”

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• Charity is without fear: having given all that it has, it has nothing left to lose.

  Thomas Merton

  Charity, Given, Loses

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.174, Shambhala Publications

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• The end of the world will be legal.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, World, End Of The World

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• Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Artist, Saint

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

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• If we examine ourselves carefully we shall see most of us have an enormous amount of unfinished business...We have to be free so that we can just step across the line and that's it. That is what real freedom is.

  Thomas Merton

  Real, Unfinished Business, Lines

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• It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Charity, Spirit

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.190, Shambhala Publications

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• Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice.

  Thomas Merton

  Peace, Sacrifice, Heroism

  Thomas Merton (2010). “The Nonviolent Alternative”, p.35, Macmillan

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• The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Journey, Acting

  Thomas Merton (1999). “Mystics and Zen Masters”, p.92, Macmillan

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• We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the thing necessary for us-whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need

  Thomas Merton

  Missing, Needs, May

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.137, Shambhala Publications

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• To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Acknowledge Him, Evil

  Thomas Merton (2002). “No Man Is an Island”, p.234, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• My own personal task is not simply that of poet and writer (still less commentator, pseudo-prophet); it is basically to praise God out of an inner center of silence, gratitude, and 'awareness.' This can be realized in a life that apparently accomplishes nothing. Without centering on accomplishment or nonaccomplishment, my task is simply the breathing of this gratitude from day to day, in simplicity, and for the rest turning my hand to whatever comes, work being part of praise, whether splitting logs or writing poems, or best of all simple notes.

  Thomas Merton

  Gratitude, Writing, Simple

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• 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.

  Thomas Merton

  Reality, Men, Silence

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• Either you look at the universe as a very poor creation out of which no one can make anything, or you look at your own life and your own part in the universe as infinitely rich, full of inexhaustible interest, opening out into the infinite further responsibilities for study and contemplation and interest and praise. Beyond all and in all is God.

  Thomas Merton

  Looks, Study, Infinite

  "Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation".

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• Love is...like a spring coming up out of the ground of our own depths. "I am gift." All that I am is something that's given, and given freely. Being doesn't cost anything. There's no price tag, no strings attached.

  Thomas Merton

  Love, Spring, Price Tag

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• The pleasure of a good act is something to be remembered - not in order to feed our complacency but in order to remind us that virtuous actions are not only possible and valuable, but that they can become easier and more delightful and more fruitful than the acts of vice which oppose and frustrate them.

  Thomas Merton

  Order, Complacency, Vices

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• But there is no substance under the things I have gathered together about me. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am a mistake.

  Thomas Merton

  Mistake, Ambition, Together

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• The man who lives in division is living in death. He cannot find himself because he is lost; he has ceased to be a reality. The person he believes himself to be is a bad dream.

  Thomas Merton

  Dream, Believe, Men

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.48, New Directions Publishing

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• Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself.

  Thomas Merton

  Reality, Light, Views

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• Love is a special way of being alive.

  Thomas Merton

  Love Is, Special, Alive

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• One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife.

  Thomas Merton

  Sweet, Dark, Wife

  Thomas Merton (1981). “Day of a stranger”

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• If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is "just glass."

  Thomas Merton

  Glasses, Color, Consciousness

  Thomas Merton, William H. Shannon (2010). “Thomas Merton's Paradise Journey: Writings on Contemplation”, p.222, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived.

  Thomas Merton

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.484, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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