Thomas Merton Quotes About Contemplation

Quotes about: Contemplation

• Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding.

  Thomas Merton

  Heart, Meditation, Doubt

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.12, New Directions Publishing

• 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

• But it certainly is a wonderful thing to wake up suddenly in the solitude of the woods and look up at the sky and see the utter nonsense of everything including all the solemn stuff given out by professional asses about the spiritual life; and simply to burst out laughing, and laugh and laugh, with the sky and the trees because God is not in words, and not in systems, and not in liturgical movements, and not in "contemplation" with a big "C," or in asceticism or in anything like that, not even in the apostolate.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Laughter, Sky

  Thomas Merton (2011). “The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters”, p.35, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• Contemplation is the loving sense of this life, this presence and this eternity.

  Thomas Merton

  Eternity, Contemplation, This Life

  Thomas Merton (1997). “Dancing In The Water Of Life Volume 5:1963-1965: Seeking Peace in the Hermitage”, HarperOne

• Contemplation is life itself, fully awake, fully active, and fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Gratitude, Realization

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.1, New Directions Publishing

• 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

• You have got me walking up and down all day under those trees, saying to me over and over again, "Solitude, solitude." And You have turned around and thrown the world in my lap. You have told me, "Leave all things and follow me," and then You have tied half of New York to my foot like a ball and chain. You have got me kneeling behind that pillar with my mind making a noise like a bank. Is that contemplation?

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, New York, Feet

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

• To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.

  Thomas Merton

  Joy, Intuition, Levels

  "Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation".

• Contemplation in the age of Auschwitz and Dachau, Solovky and Karaganda is something darker and more fearsome than contemplation in the age of the Church Fathers. For that very reason, the urge to seek a path of spiritual light can be a subtle temptation to sin. It certainly is sin if it means a frank rejection of the burden of our age, an escape into unreality and spiritual illusion, so as not to share the misery of other men.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Father, Mean

• 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

• Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.

  Thomas Merton

  Self, Firsts, Superficial

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.7, New Directions Publishing

• The Bible is not primarily a written or printed text to be scrutinized in private, in a scholar's study or a contemplative cell. It is a body of oral messages, announcements, prophecies, promulgations, recitals, histories, songs of praise, lamentations, etc., which are meant either to be uttered or at least read aloud, or chanted, or sung, or recited in a community convoked for the purpose of a living celebration.

  Thomas Merton

  Song, Cells, Community

• 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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