Thomas Merton Quotes - Page 4

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• Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within.

  Thomas Merton

  Names, Numbers, Giving

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

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

  Thomas Merton

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Moon

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

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• 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.

  Thomas Merton

  Real, Rain, Mean

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

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• 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.

  Thomas Merton

  Real, Thinking, Self

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

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• If a writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never be able to write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people you have got to make up your mind to write things that some men will condemn.

  Thomas Merton

  Freedom, Writing, Helping Others

  Thomas Merton, Robert Inchausti (2007). “Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing”, p.198, Shambhala Publications

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• Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves.

  Thomas Merton

  Heart, Capacity To Love, Giving

  Thomas Merton (2010). “Seasons of Celebration”, p.103, Macmillan

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• No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.

  Thomas Merton

  Men, Answers, He Man

  Thomas Merton (2012). “On Eastern Meditation”, p.16, New Directions Publishing

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• Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Violence, Cease

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

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• Action is the stream, and contemplation is the spring.

  Thomas Merton

  Spring, Catholic, Action

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

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• We are not converted only once in our lives but many times and this endless series of conversions and inner revolutions leads to our transformation.

  Thomas Merton

  Revolution, Transformation, Endless

  44 Copy quote

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

  Thomas Merton

  Best Love, Love One Another, Obliged

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

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• For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Destiny, Want

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.138, Shambhala Publications

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• Love in fact is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions.

  Thomas Merton

  Love, Spiritual, Exercise

  "The Wisdom of the Desert".

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• One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.

  Thomas Merton

  Inspirational, Men, Mind Your Own Business

  Thomas Merton (2003). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.259, Shambhala Publications

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• My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me...you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

  Thomas Merton

  Shadow Of Death, Ideas, May

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• The illusion that mechanical progress means human improvement ... alienates us from our own being and our own reality. It is precisely because we are convinced that our life, as such, is better if we have a better car, a better TV set, better toothpaste, etc., that we condemn and destroy our own reality and the reality of our natural resources. Technology was made for man, not man for technology. In losing touch with being and thus with God, we have fallen into a senseless idolatry of production and consumption for their own sakes.

  Thomas Merton

  Mean, Men, Technology

  Thomas Merton (2002). “Seeds”

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• Weaknesses and deficiencies . . . play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another.

  Thomas Merton

  Play, Important, Weakness

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.22, Shambhala Publications

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• Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Struggle, Reality

  "A Poetic Hope" by Cassidy Hall, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 8, 2017.

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• The biggest disease in North America is busyness.

  Thomas Merton

  Faith, Inspiration, America

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• May God prevent us from becoming "right-thinking men"-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.

  Thomas Merton

  Men, Thinking, Police

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”, p.248, Image

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• What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.

  Thomas Merton

  Mean, Giving, Firsts

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.21, Shambhala Publications

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• I see no contradiction between Buddhism and Christianity ... I intend to become as good a Buddhist as I can.

  Thomas Merton

  Buddhist, Buddhism, Christianity

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• You are made in the image of what you desire.

  Thomas Merton

  Desire, Spiritual Awakening, Made

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.64, Macmillan

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• We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.

  Thomas Merton

  Giving, Ifs, Known

  John Howard Griffin, Thomas Merton (1970). “A hidden wholeness: the visual world of Thomas Merton”, Mariner Books

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• 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.

  Thomas Merton

  Cutting, Reality, Long

  "The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters".

  27 Copy quote

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