Thomas Merton Spiritual Quotes — Page 14

TM

Writer, Monk

Spiritual

“We know when we are following our vocation when our soul is set free from preoccupation with itself and is able to seek God and even to find Him, even though it may not appear to find Him. Gratitude and confidence and freedom from ourselves: these are signs that we have found our vocation and are living up to it even though everything else may seem to have gone wrong. They give us peace in any suffering. They teach us to laugh at despair. And we may have to.”

Giving Laughing Gratitude

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TM

Thomas Merton

Writer, Monk

Spiritual

“The Bible is not primarily a written or printed text to be scrutinized in private, in a scholar's study or a contemplative cell. It is a body of oral messages, announcements, prophecies, promulgations, recitals, histories, songs of praise, lamentations, etc., which are meant either to be uttered or at least read aloud, or chanted, or sung, or recited in a community convoked for the purpose of a living celebration.”

Song Community Cells

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Spiritual

“How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived.”

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Spiritual

“God, have mercy on me in the blindness in which I hope I am seeking You!”

Mercy Seeking

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Spiritual

“In the natural order no matter what ideals may be theoretically possible, most people more or less live for themselves and for their own interests and pleasures or for those of their own family or group, and therefore they are constantly interfering with one another's aims, and hurting one another and injuring one another, whether they mean it or not.”

Mean Order Hurt

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Spiritual

“The only influence that can really upset the injustice and iniquity of men is the power that breathes in the Christian tradition, renewing our participation in the Life that is the Light of men.”

Men Christian Light

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Spiritual

“The art of our time, sacred art included, will necessarily be characterized by a certain poverty, grimness and roughness which correspond to the violent realities of a cruel age.”

Art Reality Age

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Spiritual

“To those who have no personal experience of this revolutionary aspect of Christian truth, but who see only the outer crust of dead, human conservatism that tends to form around the Church the way barnacles gather on the hull of a ship, all this talk about dynamism sounds foolish.”

Way Christian Church

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Spiritual

“They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.”

Artist Wisdom Integrity

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Spiritual

“The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary every day routine.”

Way Ordinary Routine

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Spiritual

“You have got me walking up and down all day under those trees, saying to me over and over again, "Solitude, solitude." And You have turned around and thrown the world in my lap. You have told me, "Leave all things and follow me," and then You have tied half of New York to my foot like a ball and chain. You have got me kneeling behind that pillar with my mind making a noise like a bank. Is that contemplation?”

Wisdom New York Feet

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Spiritual

“The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will.”

Reality Prayer Wisdom

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Thomas Merton — Spiritual Quotes

Thomas Merton Quotes