Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.
Thomas Merton
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Thomas Merton
Age: 53 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 15
Died: 1968
Died: December 10
Autobiographer
Catholic Priest
Essayist
Journalist
Peace Activist
Poet
Theologian
Trappist Cistercian Monk
Writer
Thomas Feverel Merton
Father Louis
Help
Commit
Succumb
Peace
Oneself
Conflicting
Times
Allow
Multitude
Everyone
Projects
Multitudes
Helping
Concern
Concerns
Away
Demand
Carried
Everything
Violence
Demands
Many
Wisdom
Surrender
Fruitfulness
More quotes by Thomas Merton
A humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact, he is not afraid of anything, even himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God.
Thomas Merton
I came with the notion of perhaps saying something for monks and to monks of all religions because I am supposed to be a monk. ... My dear brothers, WE ARE ALREADY ONE. BUT WE IMAGINE THAT WE ARE NOT. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are
Thomas Merton
God must be allowed the right to speak unpredictably.... We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend. We must find him in the pagan or we will lose him in our own selves, substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction.
Thomas Merton
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Thomas Merton
To become attached to the experience of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love.
Thomas Merton
Business is not the supreme virtue, and sanctity is not measured by the amount of work we accomplish. Perfection is found in the purity of our love for God, and this pure love is a delicate plant that grows best where there is plenty of time for it to mature
Thomas Merton
A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair.
Thomas Merton
Those who think they 'know' from the beginning will never in fact come to know anything.
Thomas Merton
While some men see ordinary happenings, others see divine light and guidance.
Thomas Merton
It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.
Thomas Merton
The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will.
Thomas Merton
Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good.
Thomas Merton
I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.
Thomas Merton
Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.
Thomas Merton
The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.
Thomas Merton
You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
Thomas Merton
O God, my God, the night has values that the day never dreamed of.
Thomas Merton
To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair.
Thomas Merton
In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
Thomas Merton
Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything.
Thomas Merton