50 Motivational Thomas Merton Quotes

“The love of pleasure is destined by its very nature to defeat itself and end in frustration.” ― Thomas Merton. Here are 50 Motivational Thomas Merton Quotes.

Thomas Merton Quotes

1. “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” ― Thomas Merton 

2.“What we have to be is what we are.” ― Thomas Merton

3. “Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.”
― Thomas Merton

4.“Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.” ― Thomas Merton

5.“The love of pleasure is destined by its very nature to defeat itself and end in frustration.” ― Thomas Merton

6.“It can be said, without fear of error, that our meditation is as good as our faith.” ― Thomas Merton

7. “Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God.” ― Thomas Merton

8. “Discipline is most important, and without it no serious meditation will ever be possible. But it should be one’s own discipline, not a routine mechanically imposed from the outside.” ― Thomas Merton

9.“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our own image.”
― Thomas Merton

10. “Silence is not broken by speech, but by the anxiety to be heard.” ― Thomas Merton

11.“Without courage we can never attain to true simplicity. Cowardice keeps us “double minded” —hesitating between the world and God.” ― Thomas Merton

12. “Everything that happens to the poor, the meek, the desolate, the mourners, the despised, happens to Christ.”
― Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes

13.“Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.” ― Thomas Merton

14.“Freedom is perfect when no other love can impede our desire to love God” ― Thomas Merton

15. “Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.” ― Thomas Merton

16. “To place your trust in visible things is to live in despair.” ― Thomas Merton

17. “Get warm any way you can, and love God and pray.” ― Thomas Merton

18. “When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.” ― Thomas Merton

19. “Those who imagine that they can discover special gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God’s will and his grace.” ― Thomas Merton

20.“The deepest need of our darkness is to comprehend the light which shines in the midst of it.” ― Thomas Merton

21. “Effort is necessary, enlightened, well-directed and sustained.” ― Thomas Merton

22. “Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.” ― Thomas Merton

23.“The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds” ― Thomas Merton

24.“We cannot see things in perspective until we cease to hug them to our own bosom.” ― Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes

25. “For whatever is demanded by truth, by justice, by mercy, or by love must surely be taken to be willed by God.”
― Thomas Merton

26. “The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.” ― Thomas Merton

27. “Discretion tells us what God wants of us and what He does not want of us.” ― Thomas Merton

28.“Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.” ― Thomas Merton

29. “I don’t even need to know precisely what I am doing, except that I am acting for the love of God.” ― Thomas Merton

30. “Pride makes us artificial; humility makes us real” ― Thomas Merton

31. “The truly sacred attitude toward life is in no sense an escape from the sense of nothingness that assails us when we are left alone with ourselves.” ― Thomas Merton

32. “IT is not we who choose to awaken ourselves, but God Who chooses to awaken us.” ― Thomas Merton

33.“Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.” ― Thomas Merton

34. “The mercy of God demands to be known and recognized and set apart from everything else and praised and adored in joy.” ― Thomas Merton

35.“No one can find God without having first been found by Him. A monk is a man who seeks God because he has been found by God.” ― Thomas Merton

36. “We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.”― Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton Quotes

37. “Those who are not grateful soon begin to complain of everything.” ― Thomas Merton

38. “I find I serve the world best by keeping my distance and freedom.” ― Thomas Merton

39. “All good meditative prayer is a conversion of our entire self to God.” ― Thomas Merton

40.“The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living.” ― Thomas Merton

41. “In our present attitude the natural world remains a commodity to be bought and sold, not a sacred reality to be venerated.” ― Thomas Merton

42.“What you fear is an indication of what you seek.” ― Thomas Merton

43.“Humility is the surest sign of strength.” ― Thomas Merton

44.“We are not capable of union with one another on the deepest level until the inner self in each one of us is sufficiently awakened to confront the inmost spirit of the other.” ― Thomas Merton

45. “The time will come when they will sell you even your rain.” ― Thomas Merton

46. “We believe, not because we want to know, but because we want to be.” ― Thomas Merton

47. “The whole of life is to spiritualize our activities by humility and faith, to silence our nature by charity.” ― Thomas Merton

48.“‎Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.” ― Thomas Merton

49. “Our material riches unfortunately imply a spiritual, cultural, and moral poverty that are perhaps far greater than we see.” ― Thomas Merton

50. “Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.”
― Thomas Merton