Top 93 Love Thomas Merton Quotes
#1. In the spiritual life there is no such thing as an indifference to love or hate.
Thomas Merton
#2. The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.
Thomas Merton
#3. To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason.
Thomas Merton
#4. We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others.
Thomas Merton
#5. And when I thought there was no God and no love and no mercy, you were leading me all the while into the midst of His love and His mercy and taking me, without my knowing anything about it, to the house that would hide me in the secret of His Face.
Thomas Merton
#6. True happiness is found in unselfish Love, A love which increases in proportion as it is shared.
Thomas Merton
#7. But precisely this illusion that everything is "clear" is what is blinding us all. It is a serious temptation, and it is a subtle form of pride and worldly love of power and revenge.
Thomas Merton
#8. Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections less by seeing than by fruitive love.
Thomas Merton
#9. 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
#10. A man is enriched by the faith, and if you will by the hope and humility, with which he calls on the most sweet Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ; and he is enriched also by peace and love. For these are truly a three-stemmed life-giving tree planted by God.
Thomas Merton
#12. I don't even need to know precisely what I am doing, except that I am acting for the love of God.
Thomas Merton
#13. 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
#14. Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible.
Thomas Merton
#15. 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.
Thomas Merton
#16. Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves.
Thomas Merton
#17. This unity in love is one of the most characteristic works of the inner self, so that paradoxically the inner "I" is not only isolated but at the same time united with others on a higher plane, which is in fact the plane of spiritual solitude.
Thomas Merton
#18. We will to separate ourselves from that love. We reject it entirely and absolutely, and will not acknowledge it, simply because it does not please us to be loved.
Thomas Merton
#19. But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others.
Thomas Merton
#20. The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love, and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.
Thomas Merton
#21. O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't.
Thomas Merton
#22. Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.
Thomas Merton
#23. This act of total surrender is not merely a fantastic intellectual and mystical gamble; it is something much more serious. It is an act of love for this unseen person, who, in the very gift of love by which we surrender ourselves to his reality also makes his presence known to us.
Thomas Merton
#24. Every breath we draw is a gift of God's love; every moment of existence is a grace.
Thomas Merton
#25. Love not only prefers the good of another to my own, but it does not even compare the two.
Thomas Merton
#26. Love is free; it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love's sake.
Thomas Merton
#27. To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God.
Thomas Merton
#28. To love blindly is to love selfishly, because the goal of such love is not the real advantage of the beloved but only the exercise of love in our own souls.
Thomas Merton
#29. Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another.
Thomas Merton
#30. Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.
Thomas Merton
#32. I am happy that I can at least want to love God. Perhaps that is all I've got, but it is already all that is essential. And He will take care of the rest.
Thomas Merton
#34. We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation
Thomas Merton
#35. 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.
Thomas Merton
#36. The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.
Thomas Merton
#37. 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.
Thomas Merton
#38. A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying [God]. It "consents," so to speak, to [God's] creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree
Thomas Merton
#39. Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love ...
Thomas Merton
#40. A Christian is committed to the belief that Love and Mercy are the most powerful forces on earth.
Thomas Merton
#41. Duty does not have to be dull. Love can make it beautiful and fill it with life.
Thomas Merton
#42. My true personality will be fulfilled in the Mystical Christ in this one way above all, that through me, Christ and His Spirit will be able to love you and all men and God the Father in a way that would be possible in no one else. Love
Thomas Merton
#43. One opens the inner doors of one's heart to the infinite silences of the Spirit, out of whose abysses love wells up without fail and gives itself to all.
Thomas Merton
#44. Love is perfect in proportion to it's freedom.
Thomas Merton
#45. It is lawful to love all things and to seek them, once they become means to the love of God. There is nothing we cannot ask of Him if we desire it in order that He may be more loved by ourselves or by other men.
Thomas Merton
#46. ... He is most glorified by those in whom His mercy has produced the greatest love.
Thomas Merton
#47. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.
Thomas Merton
#48. 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.
Thomas Merton
#49. It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.
Thomas Merton
#50. The distinctive characteristic of religious meditation is that it is a search for truth which springs from love and which seeks to possess the truth not only by knowledge but also by love.
Thomas Merton
#51. Nevertheless, every day love corners me somewhere and surrounds me with peace without my having to look very far or very hard or do anything special. God
Thomas Merton
#53. We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others.
Thomas Merton
#54. It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.
Thomas Merton
#55. Oh, America, how I began to love your country! What miles of silences God has made in you for contemplation! If only people realized what all your mountains and forests are really for!
Thomas Merton
#57. Love is ... like a spring coming up out of the ground of our own depths. "I am gift." All that I am is something that's given, and given freely. Being doesn't cost anything. There's no price tag, no strings attached.
Thomas Merton
#58. Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, the perfection of His love.
Thomas Merton
#59. For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another. If my heart does not first belong to me, how can I give it to another?
Thomas Merton
#60. Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness.
Thomas Merton
#61. If we are to love sincerely, and with simplicity, we must first of all overcome the fear of not being loved.
Thomas Merton
#62. In a world of noise, confusion and conflict it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace. In such places love can blossom.
Thomas Merton
#64. 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.
Thomas Merton
#65. I am earth, earth My heart's love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected
Thomas Merton
#66. Good Shepherd, You have a wild and crazy sheep in love with thorns and brambles. But please don't get tired of looking for me! I know You won't. For You have found me. All I have to do is stay found.
Thomas Merton
#67. If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology. For religion goes beyond words and actions, and attains to the ultimate Truth only in silence and Love.
Thomas Merton
#68. To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.
Thomas Merton
#71. Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38
Thomas Merton
#72. We who claim to love peace and justice must always be careful that we do not use our righteousness to provoke the violent, and in this way bring about the conflict for which we, too, like other men, are hungering in secret, and with suppressed barbarity.
Thomas Merton
#74. Love triumphs, at least in this life, not by eliminating evil once for all, but by resisting and overcoming it anew every day.
Thomas Merton
#75. 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
#76. The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thomas Merton
#77. His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept.
Thomas Merton
#78. Indeed, it is a kind of quintessence of pride to hate and fear even the kind and legitimate approval of those who love us! I mean, to resent it as a humiliating patronage.
Thomas Merton
#79. For power can guarantee the interests of some men but it can never foster the good of man. Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all the others. Only love can attain and preserve the good of all. Any claim to build the security of all on force is a manifest imposture.
Thomas Merton
#80. Love, in fact, is the spiritual life; and without it, all other exercises of the spirit are emptied of content.
Thomas Merton
#81. Get warm any way you can, and love God and pray.
Thomas Merton
#82. Love is not a mere emotion or sentiment. It is the lucid and ardent responses of the whole person to a value that is revealed to him as perfect.
Thomas Merton
#83. 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
#84. My life is ... a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though 1 were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the love and protection of Him who guides me.
Thomas Merton
#85. Love, then, must be true to the ones we love and to ourselves, and also to its own laws. I cannot be true to myself if I pretend to have more in common than I actually have with someone whom I may like for a selfish and unworthy reason.
Thomas Merton
#86. Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost
Thomas Merton
#87. 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
#88. A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book.
Thomas Merton
#90. The gift of love is the gift of the power and capacity to love, and therefore, to give love with full effect is also to receive it. So love can only be kept by being given away, and it can only be given perfectly when it is also received.
Thomas Merton
#91. And in a sense, this terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it.
Thomas Merton
#93. The love of pleasure is destined by its very nature to defeat itself and end in frustration.
Thomas Merton
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