Thomas Merton Quotes

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Every true artist feels that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

I always like to believe that my work is about the expansion of the possibilities of the viewer. So if you have a sense of a heightened situation where there's an excitement, a physical excitement and an intellectual stimulation, there's just this sense of expansion. Because that's where the art happens. Inside the viewer.

The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.

Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

All great art allows us this: a glimpse across the limits of our self.

One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.

The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.

Art is the pleasure of a spirit that enters nature and discovers that it too has a soul.

The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.

All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

Poetry, Painting & Music, the three Powers in man of conversing with Paradise, which the flood did not sweep away.

I don't think biology is replacing the feeling experienced through art. Biology is capable of giving additional insights. It's a parallel, not a substitutive process.

Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.

There are people who buy pictures because they were difficult to do, and are done. Such pictures are often only a record of pain and dull perseverance. Great works of art should look as though they were made in joy. Real joy is a tremendous activity, dull drudgery is nothing to it.

Art is a creative effort of which the wellsprings lie in the spirit, and which brings us at once the most intimate self of the artist and the secret concurrences which he has perceived in things by means of a vision or intuition all his own, and not to be expressed in ideas and in words-expressible only in the work of art.

Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.

Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.

Art is contemplation of the world in a state of grace and imaginatively reflecting that subjective understanding.

The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.

My paintings are not meant to be tasted.