Thomas Merton: Trending quotes

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Thomas Merton: 184 quotes18 likes

“The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.”

Thomas Merton book No Man Is an Island

Source: No Man Is an Island

“Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.”

Source: Thoughts in Solitude

“In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question.”

Source: New Seeds of Contemplation

“Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny…. To work out our identity in God.”

Source: New Seeds of Contemplation

“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!”

“The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living.”

“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 on
How can it be spoken.”

“For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.”

“The end of the world will be legal.”

“…. it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.”

“Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.”

“The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.”

“Whose silence are you?”

“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”

“It is true that the materialistic society, the so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism, has produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of this worldliness. And nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money. We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”

Thomas Merton book The Seven Storey Mountain

The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)

“By my monastic life and vows I am saying No to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, the staged political trials, the judicial murders, the racial injustices, the economic tyrannies, and the whole socio-economic apparatus which seems geared for nothing but global destruction in spite of all its fair words in favor of peace.”

Source: Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation, pp. 81-82

“The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.”

Statement from his final address, during a conference on East-West monastic dialogue, delivered just two hours before his death (10 December 1968), quoted in Religious Education, Vol. 73 (1978), p. 292, and in The Boundless Circle : Caring for Creatures and Creation (1996) by Michael W. Fox.

“Is there any man who has ever gone through a whole lifetime without dressing himself up, in his fancy, in the habit of a monk and enclosing himself in a cell where he sits magnificent in heroic austerity and solitude, while all the young ladies who hitherto were cool to his affections in the world come and beat on the gates of the monastery crying, "Come out, come out!"”

Thomas Merton book The Seven Storey Mountain

The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.”

Attributed to Merton in a number of sources, the earliest located being Studia mystica, Volumes 5-6 (1982), p. 76 http://books.google.com/books?id=59EYAAAAIAAJ&q=%22problem+to+be+solved%22#search_anchor. This does not attribute a direct quote to Merton, but says "To use another of Merton's favorite distinctions, for Furlong Merton's life is seen principally as a problem to be solved, which it was, in the final analysis, successfully, rather than a mystery to be lived". The next-earliest source located is the 1998 book The Artist's Way at Work: Riding the Dragon by Mark Bryan and Julia Cameron, which attributes the exact quote to Merton on p. 152 http://books.google.com/books?id=CghAQDPahhcC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA152#v=onepage&q&f=false. In reality this seems to be a slightly altered version of the quote "The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved; it is a reality to be experienced" which appeared in the 1928 book The Conquest of Illusion by Jacobus Johannes Leeuw, p. 9 http://books.google.com/books?id=OFdVAAAAMAAJ&q=%22not+a+problem+to+be+solved%22#search_anchor. <br class="br">Misattributed

“A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying God. It “consents,” so to speak, to God's creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree.”

New Seeds of Contemplation (1972).