Thomas Merton Quotes About Imagination

Quotes about: Imagination

• We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human and visible means, nor rests in any visible end. He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.

  Thomas Merton

  Mean, Imagination, Trust In God

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.13, Shambhala Publications

• The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!

  Thomas Merton

  Life, Wisdom, Real

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.387, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.

  Thomas Merton

  Inspirational, Courage, Men

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”, p.312, Image

• Imagination has the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new.

  Thomas Merton

  Art, Light, Imagination

  Thomas Merton (1998). “Contemplation in a World of Action: Second Edition, Restored and Corrected”, p.178, University of Notre Dame Pess

• When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God.

  Thomas Merton

  Real, Imagination, Silence

  Thomas Merton (1979). “The Sign of Jonas”, Mariner Books

• He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.

  Thomas Merton

  Imagination, Trust In God, Possession

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.13, Shambhala Publications

• If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence. Since God cannot be imagined, anything our imagination tells us about Him is ultimately a lie and therefore we cannot know Him as He really is unless we pass beyond everything that can be imagined and enter into an obscurity without images and without the likeness of any created thing.

  Thomas Merton

  Lying, Imagination, Silence

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.131, New Directions Publishing

• The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.

  Thomas Merton

  Imagination, Should, Certain

• The modern child may early in his or her existence have natural inclinations toward spirituality. The child may have imagination, originality, a simple and individual response to reality, and even a tendency to moments of thoughtful silence and absorption. All these tendencies, however, are soon destroyed by the dominant culture. The child becomes a yelling, brash, false little monster, brandishing a toy gun or dressed up like some character he has seen on television.

  Thomas Merton

  Children, Character, Reality

• As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Self, Long

• We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation

  Thomas Merton

  Imagination, Kind, Obscure

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.51, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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