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Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.
Thomas Merton
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Thomas Merton
Age: 53 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 15
Died: 1968
Died: December 10
Autobiographer
Catholic Priest
Essayist
Journalist
Peace Activist
Poet
Theologian
Trappist Cistercian Monk
Writer
Thomas Feverel Merton
Father Louis
Error
Grains
Trees
Greenhouses
Errors
Greenhouse
Kept
Poisonous
Tree
Planted
Giant
Become
Grain
Wells
Giants
Innocently
Well
More quotes by Thomas Merton
If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is just glass.
Thomas Merton
There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Thomas Merton
When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.
Thomas Merton
We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation
Thomas Merton
Consequently, the truth of God lives in our souls more by the power of superior moral courage than by the light of an eminent intelligence. Indeed, spiritual intelligence itself depends on the fortitude and patience with which we sacrifice ourselves for the truth, as it is communicated to our lives concretely in the providential will of God
Thomas Merton
The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical.
Thomas Merton
Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.
Thomas Merton
The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth.
Thomas Merton
Faith is the door to the full inner life of the Church, a life which includes not only access to an authoritative teaching but above all to a deep personal experience which is at once unique and yet shared by the whole Body of Christ, in the Spirit of Christ.
Thomas Merton
One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.
Thomas Merton
When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.
Thomas Merton
Those who think they 'know' from the beginning will never in fact come to know anything.
Thomas Merton
Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.
Thomas Merton
Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38
Thomas Merton
Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good.
Thomas Merton
It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.
Thomas Merton
To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason.
Thomas Merton
May God prevent us from becoming right-thinking men-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.
Thomas Merton
Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.
Thomas Merton
Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God.
Thomas Merton
