Thomas Merton Quotes About Saints

Quotes about: Saints

• Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.

  Thomas Merton

  Religious, Writing, Artist

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.98, New Directions Publishing

• I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within.

  Thomas Merton

  Kindness, Real, Thinking

• Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Artist, Saint

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.98, New Directions Publishing

• For me to be a saint means to be myself.

  Thomas Merton

  Mean, Saint

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.31, New Directions Publishing

• Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.

  Thomas Merton

  Integrity, Artist, Haste

  Thomas Merton (2003). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.101, Shambhala Publications

• As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is the resetting of a body of broken bones. Even saints cannot live with saints on this earth without some anguish. There are two things which men can do about the pain of disunion with other men. They can love or they can hate.

  Thomas Merton

  Pain, Hate, Love Is

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.72, New Directions Publishing

• People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Ideas, People

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.281, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Saints are what they are not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everyone else.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Saint, Sanctity

  Thomas Merton (2002). “Seeds”

• For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Mean, Self

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.31, New Directions Publishing

• 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

• For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Light, Darkness

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

• They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Integrity, Artist

  Thomas Merton, M. Basil Pennington (2005). “Thomas Merton: I Have Seen what I was Looking for : Selected Spiritual Writings”, p.22, New City Press

• The Hindus are not looking for us to send them men who will build schools and hospitals, although those things are good and useful in themselves--and perhaps very badly needed in India: they want to know if we have any saints to send them.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, School, Men

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.240, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• What do you want to want to be, anyway?" "I don't know; I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic." "What you should say"--he told me--"what you should say is that you want to be a saint.

  Thomas Merton

  Catholic, Saint, Want

• To be a saint is to be yourself.

  Thomas Merton

  Being Yourself, Saint

• It is true to say that for me sanctity consists in being myself and for you sanctity consists of being yourself and that, in the last analysis, your sanctity will never be mine and mine will never be yours, except in the communism of charity and grace. For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.

  Thomas Merton

  Being Yourself, Mean, Who I Am

• 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

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