Thomas Merton Quotes

It is the function of creative man to perceive and to connect the seemingly unconnected.

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.

It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.

I feel like science and art are cousins.

Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the "Aha." Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in - the one that we think is reality.

You ride astride the imaginary in order to hunt down the real.

The discoverer and the poet are inventors; and they are so because their mental vision detects the unapparent, unsuspected facts, almost as vividly as ocular vision rests on the apparent and familiar.

I try to make everything creative because it's stimulating. There is this great Stanley Kubrick quote somewhere about how life is sort of bad and how creating is important because it lets a little light in.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.

The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.

Science provides an understanding of a universal experience. Arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience.

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

Imagination decides everything.

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

Art is more engaging that propaganda.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.