Thomas Merton Quotes - Page 5

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• Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Book, Love You

  44 Copy quote

• I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

  Thomas Merton

  Men, Race, People

  54 Copy quote

• When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable.

  Thomas Merton

  Country, Peace, War

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.121, New Directions Publishing

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• It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, now I realize what we all are . If only they [people] could all see themselves as they really are I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusions, a point of pure truth This little point is the pure glory of God in us. It is in everybody.

  Thomas Merton

  Fall, Destiny, Race

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• The illusion that mechanical progress means human improvement ... alienates us from our own being and our own reality. It is precisely because we are convinced that our life, as such, is better if we have a better car, a better TV set, better toothpaste, etc., that we condemn and destroy our own reality and the reality of our natural resources. Technology was made for man, not man for technology. In losing touch with being and thus with God, we have fallen into a senseless idolatry of production and consumption for their own sakes.

  Thomas Merton

  Mean, Men, Technology

  Thomas Merton (2002). “Seeds”

  31 Copy quote

• There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious unity and integrity is wisdom, the mother of us all, "natura naturans." There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness, and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being.

  Thomas Merton

  Mother, Nature, Integrity

  64 Copy quote

• A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Men, Succeed

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.133, Shambhala Publications

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• 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

  31 Copy quote

• There were only a few shepherds at the first Bethlehem. The ox and the donkey understood more of the first Christmas than the high priests in Jerusalem. And it is the same today.

  Thomas Merton

  Christmas, Shepherds, Jerusalem

  "Evangelical Sunday School Lesson Commentary 2013-2014". Book by Lance Colkmire, p. 164, January 5, 2012.

  46 Copy quote

• 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

  Imagination, Trust In God, Possession

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.13, Shambhala Publications

  15 Copy quote

• The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer.

  Thomas Merton

  Suffering Pain, World Suffering, People

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.116, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  38 Copy quote

• What we have to be is what we are.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom

  Thomas Merton (1975). “The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton”, p.308, New Directions Publishing

  10 Copy quote

• The basic problem is not political, it is apolitical and human. One of the most important things to do is to keep cutting deliberately through political lines and barriers and emphasizing the fact that these are largely fabrications and that there is another dimension, a genuine reality, totally opposed to the fictions of politics: the human dimension which politics pretend to arrogate entirely to themselves. This is the necessary first step along the long way toward the perhaps impossible task of purifying, humanizing and somehow illuminating politics themselves.

  Thomas Merton

  Cutting, Reality, Long

  "The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters".

  26 Copy quote

• The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!

  Thomas Merton

  Life, Wisdom, Real

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.387, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  23 Copy quote

• If it so happened that I had once written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again. If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.

  Thomas Merton

  Cost, Care, Shapes

  Thomas Merton (2002). “Seeds”

  66 Copy quote

• Paradoxically, I have found peace because I have always been dissatisfied. My moments of depression and despair turn out to be renewals, new beginnings. If I were once to settle down and be satisfied with the surface of life, with its divisions and its cliches, it would be time to call in the undertaker... So, then, this dissatisfaction which sometimes used to worry me and has certainly, I know, worried others, has helped me in fact to move freely and even gaily with the stream of life.

  Thomas Merton

  Moving, New Beginnings, Worry

  Thomas Merton (2008). “Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation: Easyread Large Bold Edition”, p.90, ReadHowYouWant.com

  52 Copy quote

• Teach me to go to the country beyond words and beyond names.

  Thomas Merton

  Country, Names, Teach

  9 Copy quote

• Humility is the surest sign of strength.

  Thomas Merton

  Humility

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.190, New Directions Publishing

  9 Copy quote

• We stumble and fall constantly, even when we are most enlightened.

  Thomas Merton

  Courage, Fall, Enlightened

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.53, Macmillan

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• I was not sure where I was going, and I could not see what I would do when I got [there]. But you saw further and clearer than I, and you opened the seas before my ship, whose track led me across the waters to a place I had never dreamed of, and which you were even then preparing to be my rescue and my shelter and my home.

  Thomas Merton

  Home, Sea, Track

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

  10 Copy quote

• Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Silence, Sound

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.134, Shambhala Publications

  7 Copy quote

• The meaning of life is found in openness to being and "being present" in full awareness.

  Thomas Merton

  Life, Awareness, Found

  Thomas Merton (2010). “Zen and the Birds of Appetite”, p.81, New Directions Publishing

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• The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Pain, Fall

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.92, Shambhala Publications

  28 Copy quote

• My life is ... a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though 1 were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the love and protection of Him who guides me.

  Thomas Merton

  Night, Hands, Action

  Thomas Merton (2011). “The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters”, p.86, Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

• Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.

  Thomas Merton

  Giving Up, Self, Doe

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.33, Macmillan

  14 Copy quote

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