Thomas Merton Quotes

608 quotes · Writer, Monk

Page 27 of 50

Thomas Merton Quotes

All Spiritual Philosophical Love Courageous Grateful 608 quotes · page 27 of 50

Writer, Monk

Philosophical

“To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.”

Light Events Hell

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Thomas Merton

Writer, Monk

Philosophical

“You must realize that it is the ordinary way of God's dealings with us that our ideas do not work out speedily and efficiently as we would like them to. The reason for this is not only the loving wisdom of God, but also the fact that our acts have to fit into a great complex pattern that we cannot possibly understand. I have learned over the years that Providence is always a whole lot wiser than any of us, and that there are always not only good reasons, but the very best reasons for the delays and blocks that often seem to us so frustrating and absurd.”

Years Ideas Block

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Spiritual

“Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God.”

Men Inspiration Faith

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Calm

“Take more time, cover less ground.”

Focus Patience

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Courageous

“To worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell.”

Self Hell

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Spiritual

“In order to find God in ourselves, we must stop looking at ourselves, stop checking and verifying ourselves in the mirror of our own futility, and be content to be in Him and to do whatever He wills, according to our limitations, judging our acts not in the light of our own illusions, but in the light of His reality which is all around us in the things and people we live with.”

Reality Light Mirrors

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Courageous

“The danger of education, I have found, is that it so easily confuses means with ends. Worse than that, it quite easily forgets both and devotes itself merely to the mass production of uneducated gradtuates - people literaly unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade which they and their contemporaries have conspired to call "life".”

People Mean Atheism

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Spiritual

“As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination.”

Long Self Spiritual

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Spiritual

“None of our prayers should ever be petitions for our own needs: for this is only another subtle way of trying to put ourselves on the same plane as God — acting as if we had no needs, as if we were not creatures, not dependent on Him.”

Prayer Wisdom Pride

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Spiritual

“Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.”

Illusion Contemplative True Relationship

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Spiritual

“The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.”

Self Wisdom Jewels

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Melancholic

“Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.”

Artist Integrity Haste

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