Thomas Merton Quotes - Page 14

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• When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, then society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Hate, Men

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• Love is its own reward.

  Thomas Merton

  Love You, Unconditional Love, Love Is

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• a man can radically change his life and attain to a deeper meaning, a more perfect integration, a more complete fulfillment, a more total liberty of spirit than are possible in the routines of a purely active existence centered on money-making.

  Thomas Merton

  Change, Money, Men

  Thomas Merton (1999). “Mystics and Zen Masters”, p.8, Macmillan

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• Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences.

  Thomas Merton

  Thinking, Discovery, Years

  Thomas Merton (2002). “The Sign of Jonas”, p.216, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Stop thinking and start looking.

  Thomas Merton

  Thinking

  John C. H. Wu, Jingxiong Wu, Thomas Merton, Kenneth Kraft (2003). “The Golden Age of Zen: Zen Masters of the T'Ang Dynasty”, p.18, World Wisdom, Inc

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• God must be allowed the right to speak unpredictably.... We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend. We must find him in the pagan or we will lose him in our own selves, substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction.

  Thomas Merton

  Faith, Inspiration, Self

  Thomas Merton, Ernesto Cardenal (2017). “From the Monastery to the World: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal”, p.312, Counterpoint Press

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• I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and happening, and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it.

  Thomas Merton

  Knowing, Space, Silence

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• Those who think they 'know' from the beginning will never in fact
  come to know anything.

  Thomas Merton

  Thinking, Facts, Knows

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Contemplative Prayer”, p.13, Image

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• 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

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• One has to be alone, under the sky, Before everything falls into place and one finds his or her own place in the midst of it all. We have to have the humility to realize ourselves as part of nature.

  Thomas Merton

  Fall, Humility, Sky

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• Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence.

  Thomas Merton

  Giving, Perspective, Silence

  Thomas Merton (1979). “Love and Living”, p.49, Macmillan

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• To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason.

  Thomas Merton

  Men, Opposites, Proud

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.50, Macmillan

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• Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny....To work out our identity in God.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Destiny, Work Out

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.10, New Directions Publishing

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• Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything.

  Thomas Merton

  Risk

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.104, New Directions Publishing

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• 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”

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• Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.

  Thomas Merton

  Crow, Mind, Glitter

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.104, New Directions Publishing

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• 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

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• What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.

  Thomas Merton

  Rain, Night, Long

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• Place no hope in the feeling of assurance, in spiritual comfort. You may well have to get along without this. Place no hope in the inspirational preachers of Christian sunshine, who are able to pick you up and set you back on your feet and make you feel good for three or four days-until you fold up and collapse into despair. Self-confidence is a precious natural gift, a sign of health. But it is not the same thing as faith. Faith is much deeper, and it must be deep enough to subsist when we are weak, when we are sick, when our self-confidence is gone, when our self-respect is gone.

  Thomas Merton

  Christian, Spiritual, Sunshine

  Thomas Merton (2003). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.190, Shambhala Publications

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• Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in the smoke of confabulation. There can be no peace on earth without the kind of inner change that brings man back to his "right mind." p. 31

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Peace, Men

  Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton (2007). “Gandhi on Non-Violence”, p.31, New Directions Publishing

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• We who claim to love peace and justice must always be careful that we do not use our righteousness to provoke the violent, and in this way bring about the conflict for which we, too, like other men, are hungering in secret, and with suppressed barbarity.

  Thomas Merton

  Ignorance, Men, Justice

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• There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves.

  Thomas Merton

  Recovery, Creative, Instinct

  Thomas Merton (2015). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.52, Sounds True

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• You are certainly one of the joys of life for all who have ever come within a mile of you.

  Thomas Merton

  Joy, Miles, Joy Of Life

  Thomas Merton (1989). “The Road to Joy: Letters to New and Old Friends”, p.71, Macmillan

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• Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it.

  Thomas Merton

  Destiny, Thinking, Our Destiny

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.31, Macmillan

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• Who is willing to be satisfied with a job that expresses all his limitations? He will accept such work only as a 'means of livelihood' while he waits to discover his 'true vocation'. The world is full of unsuccessful businessmen who still secretly believe they were meant to be artists or writers or actors in the movies.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Jobs, Believe

  Thomas Merton (2002). “Seeds”

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