Thomas Merton: Living

Thomas Merton was Priest and author. Explore interesting quotes on living.
Thomas Merton: 184   quotes 17   likes

“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”

Thomas Merton
Thinking

“The logic of the poet — that is, the logic of language or the experience itself — develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.”

Thomas Merton

The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton (1959)
Context: There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics. The former is supple and lifelike, it follows our experience. The latter is abstract and rigid, more ideal. The latter is perfectly necessary, perfectly reliable: the former is only sometimes reliable and hardly ever systematic. But the logic of mathematics achieves necessity at the expense of living truth, it is less real than the other, although more certain. It achieves certainty by a flight from the concrete into abstraction. Doubtless, to an idealist, this would seem to be a more perfect reality. I am not an idealist. The logic of the poet — that is, the logic of language or the experience itself — develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.

Love , Way

“We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.”

Thomas Merton

Thoughts in Solitude (1956)
Context: Contradictions have always existed in the soul of [individuals]. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.

Light

“Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.”

Thomas Merton
Life , World , Time

“Ask me not where I live or what I like to eat… Ask me what I am living for and what I think is keeping me from living fully that.”

Thomas Merton

Source: Thoughts in Solitude

Thinking

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

Thomas Merton

Source: New Seeds of Contemplation

God , Question

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

Thomas Merton
Life , Problem

“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)

Money , World , Flowers , Passion

“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.”

Thomas Merton

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.

Idea , Parting

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

Thomas Merton

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.
Misattributed

Life , Problem