Run to the Mountain Quotes

“Everything that happens to the poor, the meek, the desolate, the mourners, the despised, happens to Christ.”
― Thomas Merton, Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation

“El Greco is not for a lot of people and perhaps he never was. That is, he is plenty complex, and most people cannot get at him all at once because they are not all that complex themselves.”
― Thomas Merton, Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation

“The poet’s humility is to write “in fear and trembling”
― Thomas Merton, Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation

“writing these things down, they clarify themselves, they move in words and sentences, and so take shape while in my own mind they are formless and not articulate.”
― Thomas Merton, Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation

“And it was impossible for me, reading this, not to suddenly feel the great power of this blessed martyr, kept, by Almighty God, so many centuries in oblivion. The words of the salutation are full of beauty and consolation and power.”
― Thomas Merton, Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation

“We cannot possess things–we die and they are lost, or they are stolen, or they perish. But more than that, we ourselves cannot even enjoy the things themselves. To think we can is idolatry.”
― Thomas Merton, Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation

“I think poets owe a special adoration to the third person of the Holy Trinity, for by these tongues of fire all men are made poets and philosophers, and that is the way Christ would have it on earth.”
― Thomas Merton, Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation

“In a state where “liberty” is based on the “rights” of each individual there can never be true justice. But in a state where you get to discussing the rights of beavers, then there is the danger not only of injustice but of violence and general ruin, through a kind of contagious madness that could sweep the country as the fear of the Martians swept New Jersey. (Rights: if a state guarantees the Rights of all men: men either will or will not demand the extreme limit of what they are entitled to. Furthermore, it is even their right to keep more than they have a right to if they can get it legally (or even illegally, as long as the injured party doesn’t complain and demand his rights). Now everybody does not demand the full extent of his rights. Most people, to tell the truth, don’t care. But some get as much as they can get; more than they have a “right” to; they take over the “rights” of many many others who don’t really care. Thus they become so big that they are monuments, and everyone looks up to them, and makes it his ideal to get that much more of his rights too (if he only could!). The ideal is greed and avarice. How can there be justice or liberty in such a state? Yet imagine the pandemonium if every man set out to demand at once the full extent of his (nebulous) rights, and the whole nation were swept by completely active and murderous avarice!)”
― Thomas Merton, Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation

“The opposite of sloth is not 'activity' or industriousness in a business sense. It is fortitude - including patience and long-suffering.”
― Thomas Merton, Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation