Thomas Merton Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Thomas Merton on Wise Famous Quotes.
If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest God, does not bless our work.
Ash Wednesday is full of joy ... The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust.
Violence is essentially wordless. and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.
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.
The fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the wind, and join in the general Dance.
Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.
The religious answer is not really religious if it's not fully real. Evasion is the answer of superstition.
The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.
Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.
Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation.
Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God.
We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.
The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe.
I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.
If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him.
No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself.
Man is not at peace with his fellow man because he is not at peace with himself. He is not at peace with himself because he is not at peace with God.
the humble man takes whatever there is in the world that helps him to find God and leaves the rest aside. He
Love triumphs, at least in this life, not by eliminating evil once for all, but by resisting and overcoming it anew every day.
And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.
The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear.
Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.
Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.
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.
How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me?
The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.
Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.
Our sorry idiot life, our idiot existence, idiot not because it has to be but because it is not what it could be with a little more courage and care.
We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation
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
There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.
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.
When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago.
Into this world, this demented inn
in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ comes uninvited.
in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ comes uninvited.
As soon as one is conscious of the presence of the Master, one must, in all passivity, abandon the work to Him.
Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.