Thomas Merton Quotes

Teaching for creativity aims to encourage self-confidence, independence of mind, and the capacity to think for oneself.

To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

Students must have initiative; they should not be mere imitators. They must learn to think and act for themselves - and be free.

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

Think your own thoughts.

I am myself for a living. I don't animate a character.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

I think it's good to do your own thing and want to be different, and not look like everyone else.

I am sure it is one's duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one's own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

Everyone has his own sound. I'm not going to presume how to tell anybody how to write.

It's a question of not copying the masters, to look for something, good or bad, for oneself. To enter this liberated state of mind, one cannot copy the others.

I never liked to copy things that are out there. I always like to come up with something new, something different.

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.

I don't want to be somebody else.

Every man must have the right fearlessly to think independently and express his opinion about what he knows, what he has personally thought about and experienced, and not merely to express with slightly different variations the opinion which has been inculcated in him.

You just get out there and be what you want to be. That's part of evolving and part of staying true to yourself - part of remaining alive in a real authentic, long-term sense creatively: not listening to what other people tell you to be.

Many have original minds who do not think it - they are led away by custom!

The Bhagavad Gita—that ancient Indian Yogic text—says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.

To be authentic literally means to be your own author.

Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college rules.

I fell in love with skateboarding because it was individual; there were no teams, there were no captains, there was nothing to perfect. No style that had to be measured. It was completely opposite of what I saw in so many sports. It was creative. And to this day, that's what I love, that's always kept me back to it because it's endless creation.

Freedom of mind is the proof of one's existence.

I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.

As soon as you can say what you think and not what some other person has thought for you, you are on the way to being a remarkable man.

Most people are other people.