Thomas Merton Quotes

When you become a sannyasin, I initiate you into freedom, and into nothing else... I am destroying your ideologies, creeds, cults, dogmas, and I am not replacing them with anything else.

Freedom means the power to act by soul guidance, not by the compulsions of desires and habits. Obeying the ego leads to bondage; obeying the soul brings liberation.

Physical existence is so cramped.We grow old and bent over like embryos.Nine months passes;it is time to be born. The lamb wants to graze green daylight. There are ways of being born twice,of coming to where you fly,not individually like birds, but as the sun moves with his bride,sincerity.

Liberty is an acknowledgement of faith in God and his works.

In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to walk on water; we speak to the angels who call us; we move, unfettered, among the stars.

Poetry is the gate through which I enter the land of enchantment. Once inside the flaming wall, my limitations fall from me, and my spirit is free.

He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.

Whatever we may mean by 'Christian growth,' it is ultimately this: less faith in me, more faith in God.

To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become—this.

Music is a means of rapid transportation.

We are to take no counsel with flesh and blood; give ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes; to know that we know nothing, that the worst and cruelest to our eyes is not what it seems, that we have to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent from God above, and say, "It is good and wise,--God is great! Though He slay me, yet I trust in Him." Islam means, in its way, denial of self. This is yet the highest wisdom that heaven has revealed to our earth.

The more you think of yourself as shining immortal spirit, the more eager you will be to be absolutely free of matter, body, and senses. This is the intense desire to be free.

Let but faithful labourers be found, who will prove faithful to God, and there is no reason to fear that God will not prove faithful to them.

To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives: it is the only way we can leave the future open. Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surmise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more surely.

Give up bondage; become a son, be free, and then you can "see the Father", as did Jesus.

It don't matter if you believe in God Nick, he believes in you.

Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered? Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountaintop,then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shal claim your limbs,then shall you truly dance.

When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can't understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.

Transcending the world does not mean to withdraw from the world, to no longer take action, or to stop interacting with people. Transcendence of the world is to act and to interact without any self-seeking.

I'm like, "Well, damn, that means that I have to carry a flag." I don't have the freedom to just do anything, because I have the political weight of having this last name and my heritage. It's not like I've transcended, Will Smith-style. It takes a lot to pull that off, to cross over, and transcend.

Mostly I think I've learned to trust God more. I mean, if I start getting worried or freaked, I just try to put it in God's hands. Sometimes I imagine God cradling the globe in his hands, and I tell myself that as long as I'm with God, the Creator of the universe, I can be comfortable and at home anyplace on the planet.

What's unique for me, as an actor, is this idea that I don't have to be grounded to the natural law of things. I can pull things out of the air and communicate with other spirits and other elements in other languages or forms, but I'm still right here, on the earth. That's a lot of fun.

We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark.

You wouldn't want any creative process to lose its sense of fun and adventure, but that doesn't mean you can't take it seriously as well.