Thomas Merton Quotes - Page 17

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• It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.

  Thomas Merton

  Creating, Tasks, Mindfulness

  Thomas Merton (1979). “Love and Living”, p.202, Macmillan

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• The humble person receives praise the way a clean window takes the light of the sun. The truer and more intense the light is, the less you see of the glass.

  Thomas Merton

  Humble, Glasses, Light

  Thomas Merton (1972). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.189, New Directions Publishing

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• For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another. If my heart does not first belong to me, how can I give it to another?

  Thomas Merton

  Heart, Giving, Doe

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.28, Shambhala Publications

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• I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place … It is certainly part of my life of prayer.

  Thomas Merton

  Prayer, Weather, Climate

  Thomas Merton, Victor A. Kramer (1996). “Turning toward the world: the pivotal years”, Harper San Francisco

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• 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

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• Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which... are just the opposite of what we were made for?

  Thomas Merton

  Opposites, Want, Waste

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.132, Shambhala Publications

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• The things I thought were so important -- because of the effort I put into them -- have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.

  Thomas Merton

  Effort, Important, Able

  Thomas Merton (1974). “A Thomas Merton Reader”, Image

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• Consequently, the truth of God lives in our souls more by the power of superior moral courage than by the light of an eminent intelligence. Indeed, spiritual intelligence itself depends on the fortitude and patience with which we sacrifice ourselves for the truth, as it is communicated to our lives concretely in the providential will of God

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Wisdom, Sacrifice

  Thomas Merton (2002). “No Man Is an Island”, p.160, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We know when we are following our vocation when our soul is set free from preoccupation with itself and is able to seek God and even to find Him, even though it may not appear to find Him. Gratitude and confidence and freedom from ourselves: these are signs that we have found our vocation and are living up to it even though everything else may seem to have gone wrong. They give us peace in any suffering. They teach us to laugh at despair. And we may have to.

  Thomas Merton

  Gratitude, Giving, Laughing

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.147, Shambhala Publications

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• The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.

  Thomas Merton

  Way, Mercy, Contradiction

  Thomas Merton (2015). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.148, Sounds True

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• Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one's own-be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid.

  Thomas Merton

  Home, Mean, Offering

  Thomas Merton (1979). “Love and Living”, p.6, Macmillan

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• The camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.

  Thomas Merton

  Photography, Powerful, Cameras

  Thomas Merton (1975). “The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton”, p.153, New Directions Publishing

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• True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Clever, Grace

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Contemplative Prayer”, p.70, Image

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• 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

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• Our thought should not merely be an answer to what someone else has just said. Or what someone else might have said. Our interior world must be more than an echo of the words of someone else. There is no point in being a moon to somebody else's sun, still less is there any justification for our being moons of one another, and hence darkness to one another, not one of us being a true sun.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Moon, Echoes

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• People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular- and too lazy to think of anything better.

  Thomas Merton

  Thinking, People, Lazy

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

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• 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

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• Day after day I read Freud, thinking myself to be very enlightened and scientific when, as a matter of fact, I was about as scientific as an old woman secretly poring over books about occultism, trying to tell her own fortune, and learning how to dope out the future form the lines in the palm of her hand. I don't know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Crazy, Book

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• The desire to kill is like the desire to attack another with an ingot of red -hot iron: I have to pick up the incandescent metal and burn my own hand while burning the other. Hate itself is the seed of death in my own heart, while it seeks the death of the other.

  Thomas Merton

  Hate, Heart, Love Is

  "The Nonviolent Alternative".

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• I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.

  Thomas Merton

  Solitude, Secret, Desire

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer”, p.51, Harper Collins

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• Our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. Without wisdom, the apparent opposition of action and contemplation, of work and rest, of involvement and detachment, can never be resolved.

  Thomas Merton

  Truth, Intuition, Sake

  Thomas Merton (2015). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation”, p.49, Sounds True

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• There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Contemplative Life, Temptation

  Thomas Merton (1998). “Contemplation in a World of Action: Second Edition, Restored and Corrected”, p.176, University of Notre Dame Pess

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• I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.

  Thomas Merton

  Believe, Desire, Doe

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings”, p.8, Harper Collins

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• Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.

  Thomas Merton

  Advertising, Treats, Reverence

  Thomas Merton (2002). “Seeds”

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• Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Artist, Saint

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

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