Thomas Merton Quotes - Page 22

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• If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.

  Thomas Merton

  Political, Want, Study

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• The simplicity that all this presupposes is not easy to attain. I find that my life constantly threatens to become complex and divisive. A life of prayer is basically a very simple life. This simplicity, however, is the result of asceticism and effort: it is not a spontaneous simplicity.

  Thomas Merton

  Prayer, Simple, Simplicity

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• But precisely this illusion that everything is "clear" is what is blinding us all. It is a serious temptation, and it is a subtle form of pride and worldly love of power and revenge.

  Thomas Merton

  Revenge, Pride, Temptation

  Thomas Merton (1995). “Witness to Freedom: The Letters of Thomas Merton in Times of Crisis”, p.183, Macmillan

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• Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.

  Thomas Merton

  Errors, Tree, Giants

  Thomas Merton (1993). “The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers”, p.293, Macmillan

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• Solitude is so necessary both for society and for the individual that when society fails to provide sufficient solitude to develop the inner life of the persons who compose it, they rebel and seek false solitudes.

  Thomas Merton

  Solitude, Rebel, Failing

  Thomas Merton (2002). “No Man Is an Island”, p.271, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The primordial blessing, 'increase and multiply', has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror. We are numbered in billions, and massed together, marshalled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything, nauseated with the human race and with ourselves, nauseated with life.

  Thomas Merton

  Blessing, Race, Together

  Thomas Merton (1966). “Raids on the Unspeakable”, p.70, New Directions Publishing

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• As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper, so the mystery of Christ in the Gospel concentrates the rays of God's light and fire to a point that sets fire to the spirit of man. ... Through the glass of His Incarnation He concentrates the rays of His Divine Truth and Love upon us so that we feel the burn, and all mystical experience is communicated to men through the Man Christ.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Men, Fire

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.150, New Directions Publishing

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• We love the things we pretend to laugh at.

  Thomas Merton

  Laughing

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.204, Shambhala Publications

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• Teach me to take all grace / And spring it into blades of act, / Grow spears and sheaves of charity, / While each new instant, (new eternity) / Flowering with clean and individual circumstance, / Speaks me the whisper of [God's] consecrating Spirit. / Then will obedience bring forth new Incarnations / Shining to God with the features of [the Lord's] Christ.

  Thomas Merton

  Spring, Shining, Grace

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• There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Wisdom, Reality

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.18, Macmillan

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• There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude.

  Thomas Merton

  Soul, Solitude, Intimacy

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.175, Shambhala Publications

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• Because You have called me here not to wear a label by which I can recognize myself and place myself in some kind of a category. You do not want me to be thinking about what I am, but about what You are. Or rather, You do not even want me to be thinking about anything much: for You would raise me above the level of thought. And if I am always trying to figure out what I am and where I am and why I am, how will that work be done?

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Thinking, Always Trying

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The seven storey mountain”, Harcourt

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• 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”

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• First, the desert is the country of madness. Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown out into the "wilderness of upper Egypt" to "wander in dry places." Thirst drives man mad, and the devil himself is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence--lost because he has immured himself in it and closed out everything else. So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servant of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage.

  Thomas Merton

  Country, Men, Egypt

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.21, Macmillan

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• 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

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• Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.

  Thomas Merton

  Self, Firsts, Superficial

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.7, New Directions Publishing

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• Because of their enmity you will be left alone. They will cast you out and forsake you.

  Thomas Merton

  Enmity, Left Alone, Casts

  Thomas Merton, M. Basil Pennington (2005). “Thomas Merton: I Have Seen what I was Looking for : Selected Spiritual Writings”, p.53, New City Press

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• When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago.

  Thomas Merton

  Discovery, Years, Found

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

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• Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk's life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.

  Thomas Merton

  Happiness, Thinking, Ideas

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• Indeed, it is a kind of quintessence of pride to hate and fear even the kind and legitimate approval of those who love us! I mean, to resent it as a humiliating patronage.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Hate, Mean

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.152, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In the natural order no matter what ideals may be theoretically possible, most people more or less live for themselves and for their own interests and pleasures or for those of their own family or group, and therefore they are constantly interfering with one another's aims, and hurting one another and injuring one another, whether they mean it or not.

  Thomas Merton

  Hurt, Mean, Order

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.140, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Society, Degradation

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• I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may meanI myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Book, Self

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

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• The art of our time, sacred art included, will necessarily be characterized by a certain poverty, grimness and roughness which correspond to the violent realities of a cruel age.

  Thomas Merton

  Art, Reality, Age

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• The only influence that can really upset the injustice and iniquity of men is the power that breathes in the Christian tradition, renewing our participation in the Life that is the Light of men.

  Thomas Merton

  Christian, Men, Light

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.144, New Directions Publishing

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