Thomas Merton Spiritual Quotes — Page 15

TM

Writer, Monk

Spiritual

“The modern child may early in his or her existence have natural inclinations toward spirituality. The child may have imagination, originality, a simple and individual response to reality, and even a tendency to moments of thoughtful silence and absorption. All these tendencies, however, are soon destroyed by the dominant culture. The child becomes a yelling, brash, false little monster, brandishing a toy gun or dressed up like some character he has seen on television.”

Children Character Reality

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TM

Thomas Merton

Writer, Monk

Spiritual

“Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.”

Religious Form Consciousness

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Spiritual

“Whose silence are you?”

Wisdom Silence

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Spiritual

“Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest.”

Men Facts

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Spiritual

“The land which thou goest to possess is not like the land of Egypt from whence thou camest out... For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord...Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near...Why do you spend money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which doth not satisfy you?”

Wisdom Land Egypt

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Spiritual

“Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the "nothing," the "no-body" that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.”

May Bird Circles

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Spiritual

“Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.”

Men Reality Silence

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Spiritual

“Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between 'things' and 'God' as if God were another thing and as if creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God.”

Mean Spiritual Order

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Spiritual

“If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is "just glass."”

Color Glasses Consciousness

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Spiritual

“Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life.”

Christian Age Church

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Spiritual

“To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, and no man is saved by his own sufferings. To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ; more, it is to know the love of Christ Who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ.”

Men Order Wisdom

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Spiritual

“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.”

Soul Perfect Darkness

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Thomas Merton — Spiritual Quotes

Thomas Merton Quotes