Thomas Merton Hope Quotes

#1. 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

#2. No system is better than another, but some are better for certain people. The person makes a system worthwhile, not the other way around. I blended a lot of systems I had studied over the years, Judo, wrestling, boxing, Hapkido, Kenpo, Thai Boxing, American Kickboxing, Jujitsu, Aikido.

Joe R. Lansdale

#3. For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air.

Thomas Merton

#4. He is heard only when we hope to hear Him, and if, thinking our hope to be fulfilled, we cease to speak, His silence ceases to be vivid and becomes dead, even though we recharge it with the echo of our own emotional noise.

Thomas Merton

#5. It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.

William Faulkner

#6. God, have mercy on me in the blindness in which I hope I am seeking You!

Thomas Merton

#7. If you don't live by the praise of men you won't die by their criticism.

Bill Johnson

#8. If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us.

Thomas Merton

#9. We're dealing with one of the worst kinds of killer." "What kind's that?" asked the lieutenant. "Patient.

Tim Dorsey

#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

#11. This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under hope in the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly.

Thomas Merton

#12. We are united to Him in darkness, because we have to hope.

Thomas Merton

#13. You sometimes speak of gravity as essential and inherent to matter. Pray do not ascribe that notion to me, for the cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know, and therefore would take more time to consider of it.

Isaac Newton

#14. You must be a terrible burden to your mother. I am feeling so sorry for her not to have a proper daughter.
Mrs. Apusenja - To the Nines

Janet Evanovich

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Take a microphone out of my hands, and I'm just plain folks.

Willard Scott

#18. By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence.

Thomas Merton

#19. I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is.

Thomas Merton

#20. To hope is to risk frustration. Make up your mind to risk frustration.

Thomas Merton

#21. Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

Thomas Merton

#22. I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope ... there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk.

Thomas Merton

#23. The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.

Thomas Merton

#24. For true humility is, in a way, a very real despair: despair of myself, in order that I may hope entirely in You.

Thomas Merton