Darkness Quote by Thomas Merton

“For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness” quote by Thomas Merton — Download Open image

“For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness”

Thomas Merton

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More by Thomas Merton

“Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of…

Thomas Merton

If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence. Since God cannot be imagined, anything our imagination tells…

Thomas Merton

It is almost impossible to overestimate the value of true humility and its power in the spiritual life. For the beginning of humility is the beginning of blessedness and the consummation of humility is the perfection of all joy. Humility contains in itself the answer to all the great problems of the life of the soul. It is the only…

Thomas Merton

We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human…

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The desire to kill is like the desire to attack another with an ingot of red -hot iron: I have to pick up the…

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To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a…

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The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of…

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Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in…

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Things that are good are good, and if one is responding to that goodness one is in contact with a truth from which one…

Thomas Merton

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Love winter when the plant says nothing.

Thomas Merton

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The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of…

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“The wisdom of the flesh is a judgement that the ordinary ends of our natural appetites are the goods to which the whole of…

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Explore all 851 Thomas Merton quotes

More Darkness quotes

“Narrative cannot sustain formlessness any more than light can sustain darkness - it is the antithesis of formlessness, and so it can never truly communicate it. Chaos is the one truth that narrative must always betray, for in the creation of its delicate structures that reveal many truths about life, the portion of truth that has to do with incoherence…

Nicole Krauss

“Wait here, wait here!" he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. "Help, help!" he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried…

Flannery O'Connor

Strange - is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us…

Horace

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When you're scared - and I mean really scared, not just hearing a noise in the night, or standing toe to toe with someone twice your size who wants to pound you into the earth - it feels as if you're being injected with darkness. It's like black water as cold as ice settling in your body where your blood…

Alexander Gordon Smith

Clear moments are so short. There is much more darkness. More ocean than terra firma. More shadow than form.

Adam Zagajewski

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I even see the cinema itself as a woman, with its alternation of light and darkness, of appearing and disappearing images

Federico Fellini

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I guess he'll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light- that in fact the dark parts make the light visible; without them, the light would disappear. But I guess he has to…

Anne Lamott

“I promise to respect and protect your aloneness, knowing that everything created must have its period of darkness: child and bulb, poem and personality.…

anne morrow lindbergh