Quote

To Serve the God of Love one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to love in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one's neighbor.

Thomas Merton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Love
Terrible
Decision
Responsibility
Face
Unworthiness
Faces
Spite
Whether
Neighbor
Free
Serve
Must
Oneself

More quotes by Thomas Merton

Image
The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to him.
Thomas Merton
Image
That is God's call to us - simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.
Thomas Merton
Image
If we examine ourselves carefully we shall see most of us have an enormous amount of unfinished business...We have to be free so that we can just step across the line and that's it. That is what real freedom is.
Thomas Merton
Image
Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.
Thomas Merton
Image
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
Image
I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me.
Thomas Merton
Image
The camera does not know what it takes it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.
Thomas Merton
Image
Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.
Thomas Merton
Image
A daydream is an evasion.
Thomas Merton
Image
When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.
Thomas Merton
Image
The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.
Thomas Merton
Image
A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.
Thomas Merton
Image
It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not what he ought to be. If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we do away with him altogether.
Thomas Merton
Image
Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.
Thomas Merton
Image
The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe.
Thomas Merton
Image
God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of him. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But if I am true to the concept that God utters in me, if I am true to the thought of Him that I was meant to embody, I shall be full of his actuality and find him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere.
Thomas Merton
Image
For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness
Thomas Merton
Image
The land which thou goest to possess is not like the land of Egypt from whence thou camest out... For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord...Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near...Why do you spend money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which doth not satisfy you?
Thomas Merton
Image
Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.
Thomas Merton
Image
Saints are what they are not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everyone else.
Thomas Merton