Thomas Merton Quotes
May we all grow in grace and peace and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us.
The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary every day routine.
Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life.
Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good.
O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't.
Love is not a mere emotion or sentiment. It is the lucid and ardent responses of the whole person to a value that is revealed to him as perfect.
Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.
For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one's own contingent self, cannot exist where there is no contingent self to which anything can be attributed.
To become attached to the experience of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love.
That is God's call to us - simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.
Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
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.
The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical.
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 evil in the world is all of our own making, and it proceeds entirely from our ruthless, senseless, wasteful, destructive, and suicidal neglect of our own being.
The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.
Be still: There is no longer any need of comment. It was a lucky wind That blew away his halo with his cares, A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.
Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good.
If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest God, does not bless our work.
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.
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.
We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation
Violence is essentially wordless. and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.
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.
In meditative prayer, one thinks and speaks not only with the mind and lips, but in a certain sense with one's whole being... All good meditative prayer is a conversation of our entire self to God.
You pray best when the mirror of your soul is empty of every image except the Image of the Invisible Father.
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
A gentle sense of humor will be alert to detect anything that savors of a pious 'act' on the part of the penitent.
For our duties and our needs, in all the fundamental things for which we were created, come down in practice to the same thing.
The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth.
There is a subtle but inescapable connection between the "sacred" attitude and the acceptance of one's in most self.
I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to.
No one can find God without having first been found by Him. A monk is a man who seeks God because he has been found by God.
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!
Art enables us to find ourselves and loose ourselves at the same time.
His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decoration or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God's creation to bear witness for itself.
![Thomas Merton Quotes: "We do not want to be beginners [at prayer]. but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life!"](https://www.quoteslyfe.com/images/collection3/quotations114/We-do-not-want-to-be-beginners-114496.jpg)
We do not want to be beginners [at prayer]. but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life!
Pardon all runners, All speechless, alien winds, All mad waters.Pardon their impulses, Their wild attitudes, Their young flights, their reticence.When a message has no clothes onHow can it be spoken.
