Thomas Merton Quotes - Page 9

Quotes about:

• Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.

  Thomas Merton

  Love, Wisdom, Prayer

  "New Seeds of Contemplation".

  10 Copy quote

• The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis, but first of all by living. For until we have begun to live our prudence has no material to work on. And until we have begun to fail we have no way of working out our success.

  Thomas Merton

  Life, Work Out, Analysis

  10 Copy quote

• Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed . . . I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.

  Thomas Merton

  Peace, War, Fall

  18 Copy quote

• 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.

  Thomas Merton

  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

  25 Copy quote

• Today will never come again.

  Thomas Merton

  Life, Today

  6 Copy quote

• The gate of heaven is everywhere.

  Thomas Merton

  Heaven, Gates Of Heaven, Gates

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

  14 Copy quote

• I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

  Thomas Merton

  Angel, Faces, Peril

  Thomas Merton (2015). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.85, Sounds True

  15 Copy quote

• To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything.

  Thomas Merton

  Thanksgiving, Gratitude, Grateful

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

  40 Copy quote

• If we seek paradise outside ourselves, we cannot have paradise in our hearts.

  Thomas Merton

  Being Single, Being Alone, Heart

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.121, Shambhala Publications

  11 Copy quote

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

  Thomas Merton

  Country, Names, Teach

  9 Copy quote

• It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are.

  Thomas Merton

  Keys, Understanding, Enemy

  Thomas Merton (2011). “The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters”, p.216, Macmillan

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Heaven, House

  26 Copy quote

• The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.

  Thomas Merton

  Fire, Feet, World

  Thomas Merton (2002). “The Sign of Jonas”, p.228, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  17 Copy quote

• We do not exist for ourselves.

  Thomas Merton

  Life, Happiness, Success

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

  16 Copy quote

• The danger of education, I have found, is that it so easily confuses means with ends. Worse than that, it quite easily forgets both and devotes itself merely to the mass production of uneducated gradtuates - people literaly unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade which they and their contemporaries have conspired to call "life".

  Thomas Merton

  Mean, People, Atheism

  Thomas Merton (1979). “Love and Living”, p.14, Macmillan

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Thomas Merton

  Art, Moral, Kind

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

  5 Copy quote

• The soul of man, left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness. It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside and above itself. But when the light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in it.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Men, Light

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.211, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  5 Copy quote

• Perhaps peace is not, after all, something you work for, or 'fight for.' It is indeed 'fighting for peace' that starts all the wars. What, after all, are the pretexts of all these Cold War crises, but 'fighting for peace?' Peace is something you have or do not have. If you are yourself at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world. Then share your peace with everyone, and everyone will be at peace.

  Thomas Merton

  War, Fighting, World

  7 Copy quote

• I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God.

  Thomas Merton

  Catholic, Gods Will, I Can

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.26, Shambhala Publications

  8 Copy quote

• Merely to resist evil with evil by hating those who hate us and seeking to destroy them, is actually no resistance at all. It is active and purposeful collaboration in evil that brings the Christian into direct and intimate contact with the same source of evil and hatred which inspires the acts of his enemy. It leads in practice to a denial of Christ and to the service of hatred rather than love.

  Thomas Merton

  Christian, Wisdom, Hate

  8 Copy quote

• We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Failure, Fall

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.53, Macmillan

  19 Copy quote

• We too often forget that faith is a matter of questioning and struggle before it becomes one of certitude and peace. You have to doubt and reject everything else in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after you have begun to believe, your faith itself must be tested and purified. Christianity is not merely a set of forgone conclusions. Faith tends to be defeated by the burning presence of God in mystery, and seeks refuge from him, flying to comfortable social forms and safe convictions in which purification is no longer an inner battle but a matter of outward gesture.

  Thomas Merton

  Faith, Believe, Struggle

  28 Copy quote

• Prayer is an expression of who we are...We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.

  Thomas Merton

  Prayer, Expression, Who We Are

  18 Copy quote

• It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes.

  Thomas Merton

  Mistake, Destiny, Race

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”, p.154, Image

  15 Copy quote

• The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Truth, Errors

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.246, Shambhala Publications

  11 Copy quote

Page 9 of 25

First

← Prev

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin