Posts Tagged ‘Thomas Merton’

Thomas Merton – No Man Is An Island (page 205)


The most important thing in prayer is that we present ourselves as we are before God as He is. This cannot be done without a generous effort of recollection and self-searching. But if we are sincere, our prayer will never be fruitless. Our sincerity itself establishes an instant contact with the God of all truth.

Thomas Merton – No Man Is An Island (page 205)

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Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 153)


All vocations are intended by God to manifest His love in the world. For each special calling gives a man some particular place in the Mystery of Christ, gives him something to do for the salvation of all mankind.

Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 153)

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Thomas Merton – No Man Is An Island (page 137)


The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods

Thomas Merton – No Man Is An Island (page 137)

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Thomas Merton – No Man Is An Island (page 132)


For our freedom is a gift God has given us in order that He may be able to love us more perfectly, and be loved by us more perfectly in return.

Thomas Merton – No Man Is An Island (page 132)

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Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 127)


For we cannot make the best of what we are, if our hearts are always divided between what we are and what we are not.

Thomas Merton – No Man Is An Island (page 127)

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Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 64)


In order to suffer without hate we must drive out bitterness from our heart by loving Jesus.

Thomas Merton –  No Man Is an Island (page 94)

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Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 64)


And since no man is an island, since we all depend on one another, I cannot work out God’s will in my own life unless I also consciously help other men to work out His will in theirs.

Thomas Merton – No Man Is An Island (page 64)

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Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 53)


The will of the Lord is not a static center drawing our souls blindly toward itself. It is a creative power, working everywhere, giving life and being and direction to all things, and above all forming and creating, in the midst of a n old creation, a whole new world which is called the Kingdom of God.

Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 36)

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Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 36)


Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God because they induce a kind of contact with the Creator and Ruler of the Universe. The genius of the artist finds its way by the affinity of creative sympathy, or connaturality, into the living law that rules the universe. This law is nothing by the secret gravitation that draws all things to God as to their center. Since all true art lays bare the action of this same law in the depths of our own nature, it makes us alive to the tremendous mystery of being, in which we ourselves, together with all other living and existing things, come forth fro the depths of God and return again to Him. An art that does not produce something of this is not worthy of its name.

Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 36)

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