Thomas Merton Quotes About Spirituality

Quotes about: Spirituality

• A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

  Thomas Merton

  Life, God, Spiritual

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.64, Macmillan

• The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

  Thomas Merton

  Relationship, Spiritual, Inspirational Love

• The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.

  Thomas Merton

  God, Kindness, Compassion

  Thomas Merton (2015). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.22, Sounds True

• By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.

  Thomas Merton

  Music, Reading, Blue

• God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of him. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But if I am true to the concept that God utters in me, if I am true to the thought of Him that I was meant to embody, I shall be full of his actuality and find him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere.

  Thomas Merton

  Voice, Able, Spirituality

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.37, New Directions Publishing

• If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Heart, Carpe Diem

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.30, Macmillan

• 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”

• What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?

  Thomas Merton

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Moon

  Thomas Merton (2015). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.35, Sounds True

• The only true liberty is in the service of that which is beyond all limits, beyond all definitions, beyond all human appreciation: that which is All, and which therefore is no limited or individual thing: The All is no-thing, for if it were to be a single thing separated from all other things, it would not be All.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Appreciation, Liberty

  Thomas Merton (2015). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.58, Sounds True

• The importance of detachment from things, the importance of poverty, is that we are supposed to be free from things that we might prefer to people. Wherever things have become more important than people, we are in trouble. That is the crux of the whole matter.

  Thomas Merton

  People, Important, Might

  Thomas Merton (1989). “Thomas Merton in Alaska: Prelude to the Asian Journal : the Alaskan Conferences, Journals, and Letters”, p.97, New Directions Publishing

• 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

• No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Writing, Wind

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

• The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary every day routine.

  Thomas Merton

  Ordinary, Routine, Way

  Thomas Merton (2002). “The Sign of Jonas”, p.47, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Society, Degradation

• Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation.

  Thomas Merton

  Technology, Temptation, Spirituality

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”, p.18, Image

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