The Sign of Jonas Quotes

“Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“God makes us ask ourselves questions most often when He intends to resolve them. He gives us needs that He alone can satisfy, and awakens capacities that He means to fulfill. Any perplexity is liable to be a spiritual gestation, leading to a new birth and a mystical regeneration.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“Sooner or later the world must burn, and all things in it—all the books, the cloister together with the brothel, Fra Angelico together with the Lucky Strike ads which I haven’t seen for seven years because I don’t remember seeing one in Louisville. Sooner or later it will all be consumed by fire and nobody will be left—for by that time the last man in the universe will have discovered the bomb capable of destroying the universe and will have been unable to resist the temptation to throw the thing and get it over with. And here I sit writing a diary. But love laughs at the end of the world because love is the door to eternity and he who loves God is playing on the doorstep of eternity, and before anything can happen love will have drawn him over the sill and closed the door and he won’t bother about the world burning because he will know nothing but love.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“One reason why we are less fervent than we ought to be is that we cripple our own spirit by taking ourselves too seriously. We expect too much from ourselves when we ought to expect everything from God on Whom we utterly depend.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“It does no good to use big words to talk about Christ. Since I seem incapable of talking about him in the language of a child, I have reached the point where I can scarcely talk about him at all. All my words fill me with shame.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“I once thought that would be the consummation of all joy—to be united by a bond of love—to be lost in His presence there as if nothing else mattered.

"And now—there is much more. Instead of myself and my Christ and my love and my prayer, there is the might of a prayer stronger than thunder and milder than the flight of doves rising up from the Priest who is the Center of every priest, shaking the foundations of the universe and lifting up—me, Host, altar, sanctuary, people, church, abbey, forest, cities, continents, seas and worlds to God and plunging everything into Him.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“God, my God, God Whom I meet in darkness, with You it is always the same thing! Always the same question that nobody knows how to answer! I have prayed to You in the daytime with thoughts and reasons, and in the nighttime You have confronted me, scattering thought and reason. I have come to You in the morning with light and with desire, and You have descended upon me, with great gentleness, with most forbearing silence, in this inexplicable night, dispersing light, defeating all desire. I have explained to You a hundred times my motives for entering the monastery and You have listened and said nothing, and I have turned away and wept with shame. Is it true that all my motives have meant nothing? Is it true that all my desires were an illusion? While I am asking questions which You do not answer, You ask me a question which is so simple that I cannot answer. I do not even understand the question. This night, and every night, it is the same question.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“Day after day the outward man crumbles and breaks down and the inward man, the Man of Heaven, is born and grows in wisdom and knowledge before the eyes of men—who cannot recognize him.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“The only essential is not an idea or an ideal: it is God Himself, Who cannot be found by weighing the present against the future or the past but only by sinking into the heart of the present as it is.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“That is why everyone who humbleth himself shall be exalted and everyone who exalteth himself, in the appetite for great lights and extraordinary experiences and feelings and mystical consolations, shall be humbled. Because the richer he desires to be in these things the poorer he will be in the sight of God, in whose eyes all greatness is as nothing.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“discovery of God and of all things in Him. This is a wine without intoxication, a joy that has no poison hidden in it. It is life without death.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“So to listen to God means, first of all, to recognize our helplessness, our stupidity, our blindness and our ignorance. How can we ever hear Him if we think of ourselves as experts in religion?”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“The great sorrow of mankind is turned to joy by the love of Christ,”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“Thus by loving we know God in God and through God for in love the Three Divine Persons are made known to us, sealing our souls not with a static likeness but with the impression of their infinite Life. Our souls are sealed with the character of God as the air is full of sunshine. Glory to God in the highest, who has sealed us with His holiness, sealed us all together, brothers, in His Christ. Amen. Amen.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“He laments the poverty of man. We are so indigent we even need words. (Consequence: the more words we need, the greater our poverty.) We need them not only to communicate with others, but also to communicate with ourselves. For we are not ourselves. We are divided, exiled from ourselves. We have to talk to the self from which we are separated.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“There is nothing left for me but to live fully and completely in the present, praying when I pray, and writing and praying when I write, and worrying about nothing but the will and the glory of God, finding these as best I can in the sacrament of the present moment.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“The furnace of purification for the priest in the active ministry is charity for other men.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“And yet it seems to me that writing, far from being an obstacle to spiritual perfection in my own life, has become one of the conditions on which my perfection will depend.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“The truth is, I am far from being the monk or the cleric that I ought to be. My life is a great mess and tangle of half-conscious subterfuges to evade grace and duty. I have done all things badly. I have thrown away great opportunities. My infidelity to Christ, instead of making me sick with despair, drives me to throw myself all the more blindly into the arms of His mercy.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“If God wills you to die suddenly, that is a greater grace for you than any other death, because it is the one He has chosen, by His love, with all the circumstances of your life and His glory in view.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“had to find out that in the plans of Divine Providence there is no such thing as a defeat and that every step is, or ought to be, a step forward into the wilderness and that even publicity can nourish humility. It must be neither loved nor hated for itself, but simply accepted with indifference from the hand of God, that His will may be done.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“The more selfish you are, the more involved life becomes.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“Easter is like what it will be entering eternity when you suddenly, peacefully, clearly recognize all your mistakes as well as all that you did well—everything falls into place.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“Concupierunt concupiscentiam in deserto. . . . Numquid poterit parare mensam populo suo?”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“cenobitic”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“providential”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“basilica.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“Gethsemani.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

“pallets.”
― Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas