Thomas Merton Quotes — Page 26

TM

Writer, Monk

Spiritual

“We cannot find Him unless we know we need Him. We forget this need when we take a self-sufficient pleasure in our own good works. The poor and helpless are the first to find Him, Who came to seek and to save that which was lost.”

Needs Self Firsts

♥ 8

TM

Thomas Merton

Writer, Monk

Spiritual

“True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.”

Spiritual Grace Clever

♥ 8

Philosophical

“If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.”

Want Political

♥ 8

Hopeful

“Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.”

Fire Victory

♥ 8

Grateful

“Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love.”

Thanksgiving Rejoice Knowledge Of God

♥ 8

Love

“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.”

Real Being Alone Being Single

♥ 8

Spiritual

“A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions, is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of "choice" when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses.”

Choices Freedom Tasks

♥ 8

Funny

“And of course most non-Catholics imagine that the Church is immensely rich, and that all Catholic institutions make money hand over fist, and that all the money is stored away somewhere to buy gold and silver dishes for the Pope and cigars for the College of Cardinals.”

Hands Wisdom College

♥ 8

Anxious

“Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.”

World Anxiety Our World

♥ 7

Spiritual

“Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God.”

Spiritual Grace Oneness

♥ 7

Spiritual

“And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.”

Wisdom Communication Levels

♥ 7

Courageous

“Merely to resist evil with evil by hating those who hate us and seeking to destroy them, is actually no resistance at all. It is active and purposeful collaboration in evil that brings the Christian into direct and intimate contact with the same source of evil and hatred which inspires the acts of his enemy. It leads in practice to a denial of Christ and to the service of hatred rather than love.”

Christian Hate Wisdom

♥ 7