Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton

Writer, Monk

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk and writer known for his profound insights on spirituality, peace, and social justice, particularly in 'The Seven Storey Mountain.'

Wisdom Men Spiritual Mean Thinking Silence
Born
January 31, 1915
Died
December 10, 1968
Quotes
608
Rank
#286

Quote collection

Thomas Merton quotes (page 13 of 31)

608 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Thomas Merton Writer, Monk
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"But it certainly is a wonderful thing to wake up suddenly in the solitude of the woods and look up at the sky and see the utter nonsense of everything including all the solemn stuff given out by professional asses about the spiritual life; and simply to burst out laughing, and laugh and laugh, with the sky and the trees because God is not in words, and not in systems, and not in liturgical movements, and not in "contemplation" with a big "C," or in asceticism or in anything like that, not even in the apostolate."

Spiritual Laughter Sky
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"The gift of love is the gift of the power and capacity to love, and therefore, to give love with full effect is also to receive it. So love can only be kept by being given away, and it can only be given perfectly when it is also received."

Positive Love Is Law Of Attraction
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"It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are."

Keys Understanding Enemy
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"Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems."

Religious Writing Artist
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Thomas Merton Writer, Monk
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"When we are strong, we are always much greater than the things that happen to us."

Strength Strong Happens
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"We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!"

Wisdom Prayer Beginners
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"Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself."

Wisdom Ambition Way
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"I can depend less and less on my own power and sense of direction...It is so strange to advance backwards and get where you are going in a totally unexpected way"

Way Unexpected Strange
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"To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times."

Wisdom Peace Demand
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"As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is the resetting of a body of broken bones. Even saints cannot live with saints on this earth without some anguish. There are two things which men can do about the pain of disunion with other men. They can love or they can hate."

Pain Hate Love Is
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"Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them."

Crow Mind Glitter
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"The meaning of life is found in openness to being and "being present" in full awareness."

Life Awareness Found
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"What we have to be is what we are."

Wisdom
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"One has to be alone, under the sky, Before everything falls into place and one finds his or her own place in the midst of it all. We have to have the humility to realize ourselves as part of nature."

Fall Humility Sky
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"You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt."

Men Doubt Know How
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"Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice �out there� calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice �in here� calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God."

Mean Self Voice
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"If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit."

Wisdom Heart Carpe Diem
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"For me to be a saint means to be myself."

Mean Saint
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