Thomas Merton Quotes About Desire

Quotes about: Desire

• A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

  Thomas Merton

  Life, God, Spiritual

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.64, Macmillan

• You are made in the image of what you desire.

  Thomas Merton

  Desire, Spiritual Awakening, Made

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.64, Macmillan

• My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following Your Will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.

  Thomas Merton

  Faith, Believe, Inspiration

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings”, p.8, Harper Collins

• Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed . . . I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.

  Thomas Merton

  Peace, War, Fall

• We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Passion, Order

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.173, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.

  Thomas Merton

  Solitude, Secret, Desire

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer”, p.51, Harper Collins

• To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Acknowledge Him, Evil

  Thomas Merton (2002). “No Man Is an Island”, p.234, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• O God, teach me to be satisfied with my own helplessness in the spiritual life. Teach me to be content with Your grace that comes to me in darkness and that works things I cannot see. Teach me to be happy that I can depend on You. To depend on You should be enough for an eternity of joy. To depend on You by itself ought to be infinitely greater than any joy which my own intellectual appetite could desire.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Joy, Grace

• Since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to be affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs.

  Thomas Merton

  Destiny, Men, Hands

• I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.

  Thomas Merton

  Believe, Desire, Doe

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings”, p.8, Harper Collins

• One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.

  Thomas Merton

  Inspirational, Men, Mind Your Own Business

  Thomas Merton (2003). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.259, Shambhala Publications

• The desire to kill is like the desire to attack another with an ingot of red -hot iron: I have to pick up the incandescent metal and burn my own hand while burning the other. Hate itself is the seed of death in my own heart, while it seeks the death of the other.

  Thomas Merton

  Hate, Heart, Love Is

  "The Nonviolent Alternative".

• Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

  Thomas Merton

  Loneliness, Being Alone, Profound

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.81, New Directions Publishing

• The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Who I Am, Secret

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.33, New Directions Publishing

• It is not merely our own desire but the desire of Christ in His Spirit that drives us to grow in love. Those who seldom or never feel in their hearts the desire for the love of God and other men, and who do not thirst for the pure waters of desire which are poured out in us by the strong, living God, are usually those who have drunk from other rivers or have dug for themselves broken cisterns.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Strong, Heart

  Thomas Merton (2002). “No Man Is an Island”, p.206, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good.

  Thomas Merton

  Mean, Long, Evil

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.34, Macmillan

• You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer.

  Thomas Merton

  Prayer, Perfect, Desire

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, New Directions Publishing

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