99+ Thomas Merton Quotes on The Way of Chuang Tzu, No Man Is an Island and Inspiration - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous Thomas Merton quotes. There are more than 99+ quotes in our Thomas Merton quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Thomas Merton wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like The Way of Chuang Tzu, No Man Is an Island and Inspiration

The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.

Real Quotes

Our real journey in life is interior.

Real Quotes

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.

Real Quotes

Our real journey in life is interior; It is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary to respond to that action.

Real Quotes

To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything.

Gratitude Quotes

Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.

Compassion Quotes

You can now find the most ardent Christians lined up in the most ridiculous, regressive, irrational parades. If they were concerned only with flying saucers and conversations with the departed it would not be so bad: but they are also deeply involved in racism, in quasi-Fascist nationalism, in every shade of fanatical hate cult, and in every semilunatic pressure group.

It was because the saints were absorbed in God that they were truly capable of seeing and appreciating created things and it was because they loved Him alone that they alone loved everybody. S.

Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new.

Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.

Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.

Books that speak like God speak with too much authority to entertain us. Those that speak like good men hold us by their human charm; we grow by finding ourselves in them.

Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason.

The whole of life is to spiritualize our activities by humility and faith, to silence our nature by charity.

Freedom is perfect when no other love can impede our desire to love God.

Perhaps in the end the first real step toward peace would be a realistic acceptance of the fact that our political ideals are perhaps to a great extent illusions and fictions to which we cling out of motives that are not always perfectly honest: that because of this we prevent ourselves from seeing any good or any practicability in the political ideals of our enemies – which may, of course, be in many ways even more illusory and dishonest than our own.

Ultimately the only way that I can be myself is to become identified with Him in Whom is hidden the reason and fulfillment of my existence.

Love, in fact, is the spiritual life; and without it, all other exercises of the spirit are emptied of content.

It is good for the soul to be in solitude for a great part of the time. But if it should seek solitude for its own comfort and consolation, it will have to endure more darkness and more anguish and more trial. Pure prayer only takes possession of our hearts for good when we no longer desire any special light or grace or consolation for ourselves, and pray without any thought of our own satisfaction.

I simply have no business being in love and playing around with a girl, however innocently... After all I am supposed to be a monk with a vow of chastity and though I have kept my vow – I wonder if I can keep it indefinitely and still play this gorgeous game!

We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man’s reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole.

As soon as you are really alone you are with God.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one’s own contingent self, cannot exist where there is no contingent self to which anything can be attributed.

But true faith must be able to go on even when everything else is taken away from us.

To be truly Catholic is not merely to be correct according to an abstractly universal standard of truth, but also and above all to be able to enter into the problems and the joys of all, to understand all, to be all things to all.

True simplicity implies love and trust – it does not expect to be derided and rejected, any more than it expects to be admired and praised.

It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are.

The proud man loves his own illusion and self-sufficiency. The spiritually poor man loves his very insufficiency.

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.

It was in this year, too, that the hard crust of my dry soul finally squeezed out all the last traces of religion that had ever been in it. There was no room for any God in that empty temple full of dust and rubbish which I was now so jealously to guard against all intruders, in order to devote it to the worship of my own stupid will.

I must become convinced and penetrated by the realization that without my love for them they may perhaps not achieve the things God has willed for them. My.

Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis but first of all by living.

When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago.

If what most people take for granted were really true – if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now. If.

Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within.

I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God.

This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under hope in the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly.

Contemplation is the awareness and realization, even in some sense experience, of what each Christian obscurely believes: “It is now no longer I that live but Christ lives in me.” Hence.

In the end, no one can seek God unless he has already begun to find him.

Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in the smoke of confabulation. There can be no peace on earth without the kind of inner change that brings man back to his “right mind.” p. 31.

Thank God! I am only another member of the human race, like all the rest of them... As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Monastic prayer begins not so much with “considerations” as with a “return to the heart,” finding one’s deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being.

It is when we insist most firmly on everyone else being “reasonable” that we become ourselves, unreasonable.

There is a subtle but inescapable connection between the “sacred” attitude and the acceptance of one’s in most self.

The Hindus are not looking for us to send them men who will build schools and hospitals, although those things are good and useful in themselves – and perhaps very badly needed in India: they want to know if we have any saints to send them.

We can be, in some sense, friends to all men because there is no man on earth with whom we do not have something in common. But it would be false to treat too many men as intimate friends. It is not possible to be intimate with more than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common. Love, then, must.

The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of Christian thought has seriously impaired this capacity, which nonviolence must recover.

The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.

There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another’s solitude.

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