Thomas Merton Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Book, Love You

• 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

• Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.

  Thomas Merton

  Life, Country, Art

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

• I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may meanI myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Book, Self

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

• How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Book, Thinking

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.249, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Very well, then: why are you attached to any one book, or to the words and ways of one saint when he himself tells you to let them go and walk in simplicity? To hang on to him as if to make a method of him is to contradict him and to go in the opposite direction to the one in which he would have you travel.

  Thomas Merton

  Book, Opposites, Simplicity

• Curiously, the most serious religious people, or the most concerned scholars, those who constantly read the Bible as a matter of professional or pious duty, can often manage to evade a radically involved dialogue with the book they are questioning.

  Thomas Merton

  Religious, Book, People

• 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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