QUOTES by Thomas Merton
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What every man looks for in life is his own salvation and the salvation of the men he lives with. By salvation I mean first of all the full discovery of who he himself really is.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
There is in every intellect a natural exigency for a true concept of God: we are born with the thirst to know and to see Him, and therefore it cannot be otherwise.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
The religious answer is not really religious if it's not fully real. Evasion is the answer of superstition.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
Where self-interest is the bond, The friendship is dissolved When calamity comes. Where Tao is the bond, Friendship is made perfect By calamity.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, the perfection of His love.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
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.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. p. 22
Quote by -Thomas Merton
People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
For our duties and our needs, in all the fundamental things for which we were created, come down in practice to the same thing.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
The first step toward finding God--who is truth--is to discover the truth about myself; and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error
Quote by -Thomas Merton
Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
How do you expect to arrive at the end of your journey if you take the road to another man's city?(100)
Quote by -Thomas Merton
It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
It is not possible to be intimate with more than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
The peculiar grace of a shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
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.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
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.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything He has given us — and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38
Quote by -Thomas Merton
In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
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!
Quote by -Thomas Merton
I am earth, earth My heart's love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected
Quote by -Thomas Merton
We have what we seek. We don't have to rush after it. It was there all the time, and if we give it time it will make itself known to us.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
True happiness is not found in any other reward than that of being united with God. If I seek some other reward besides God Himself, I may get my reward but I cannot be happy.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
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.
Quote by -Thomas Merton
Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
Quote by -Thomas Merton