Thomas Merton Quotes

Once I started to look i finally began to see.

Open your eyes and then open your eyes again.

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

The rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at, but the moment when we are capable of seeing.

In opening them, he discovered that he had eyes.

Now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened.

An object is frequently not seen, from not knowing how to see it, rather than from any defect of the organ of vision.

Once I opened my eyes to the realities of life, I couldn't close them.

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.

It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend

Being enlightened is just being aware. It's just being aware of something that you weren't aware before.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

You wish to see; listen. Hearing is a step toward Vision.

Neither. I am just one who has woken up while the rest of you are still sleeping.

It is no advantage to be near the light if the eyes are closed.

I have gone around observing your activities from the outside. Because of this I have also been able to see things to which you have been blind... Every morning you have gone to work, but you have never been fully awake. Of course, you have seen the sun and the moon, the stars in the sky, and everything that moves, but you haven't really seen it at all. It is different for the Joker, because he was put into this world with a flaw: He sees too clearly and too much.

Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.

We see nothing till we truly understand it.

Consciousness of a fact is not knowing it: if it were, the fish would know more of the sea than the geographers and the naturalists.

There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.

You cannot defect form an insight. You cannot unsee what you have seen.

In naming that which is right before me, that which I'd otherwise miss, the invisible becomes visible.

My eyes were closed, they're open now

Awareness is always the first step.