Thomas Merton Quotes About Charity

Quotes about: Charity

• If we wait for some people to become agreeable or attractive before we begin to love them, we will never begin. If we are content to give them a cold impersonal 'charity' that is merely a matter of obligation, we will not trouble to understand them or to sympathize with them at all. And in that case we will not really love them, because love implies an efficacious will not only to do good to others exteriorly but also to find some good in them to which we can respond."

  Thomas Merton

  People, Giving, Waiting

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.179, Shambhala Publications

• Charity is without fear: having given all that it has, it has nothing left to lose.

  Thomas Merton

  Charity, Given, Loses

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.174, Shambhala Publications

• 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

  Wisdom, Charity, Spirit

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.190, Shambhala Publications

• All men who live only according to their five senses, and seek nothing beyond the gratification of their natural appetites for pleasure and reputation and power, cut themselves off from that charity which is the principle of all spiritual vitality and happiness because it alone saves us from the barren wilderness of our own abominable selfishness.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Cutting, Men

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.172, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Teach me to take all grace / And spring it into blades of act, / Grow spears and sheaves of charity, / While each new instant, (new eternity) / Flowering with clean and individual circumstance, / Speaks me the whisper of [God's] consecrating Spirit. / Then will obedience bring forth new Incarnations / Shining to God with the features of [the Lord's] Christ.

  Thomas Merton

  Spring, Shining, Grace

• It is true to say that for me sanctity consists in being myself and for you sanctity consists of being yourself and that, in the last analysis, your sanctity will never be mine and mine will never be yours, except in the communism of charity and grace. For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.

  Thomas Merton

  Being Yourself, Mean, Who I Am

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