Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68
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
Price
Destruction
Paid
Cause
Becomes
Liberty
Quoted
Causes
Wholesale
Enjoy
Mockery
More quotes by Thomas Merton
Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.
Thomas Merton
Imagination has the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new.
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
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
Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.
Thomas Merton
One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife.
Thomas Merton
A gentle sense of humor will be alert to detect anything that savors of a pious 'act' on the part of the penitent.
Thomas Merton
If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.
Thomas Merton
The goal of fasting is inner unity.
Thomas Merton
The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.
Thomas Merton
Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk's life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.
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
Humility is the surest sign of strength.
Thomas Merton
We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!
Thomas Merton
The pleasure of a good act is something to be remembered - not in order to feed our complacency but in order to remind us that virtuous actions are not only possible and valuable, but that they can become easier and more delightful and more fruitful than the acts of vice which oppose and frustrate them.
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
We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human and visible means, nor rests in any visible end. He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.
Thomas Merton
It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes.
Thomas Merton