Thomas Merton Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• For language to have meaning, there must be intervals of silence somewhere, to divide word from word and utterance from utterance. He who retires into silence does not necessarily hate language. Perhaps it is love and respect for language which imposes silence upon him. For the mercy of God is not heard in words unless it is heard, both before and after the words are spoken, in silence.

  Thomas Merton

  Hate, Mercy Of God, Silence

  Thomas Merton (1976). “The Power and Meaning of Love”

• 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".

• Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

  Thomas Merton

  Reality, Men, Silence

• The logic of the poet - that is, the logic of language or the experience itself - develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.

  Thomas Merton

  Way, Logic, Language

  "The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton". Book by Thomas Merton, 1959.

• There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics.

  Thomas Merton

  Logic, Language, Mathematics

  Thomas Merton (1995). “Run to the mountain: the story of a vocation”, Harpercollins

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