Thomas Merton Quotes About Enemies

Quotes about: Enemies

• Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. Or perhaps he is afraid of you because he feels that you are afraid of him. And perhaps if he believed you are capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy.

  Thomas Merton

  Life, Thinking, Political

  Thomas Merton (2002). “Seeds”

• When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable.

  Thomas Merton

  Country, Peace, War

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.121, New Directions Publishing

• Our God...is a consuming fire. And if we, by love, become transformed into Him and burn as He burns, His fire will be our everlasting joy. But if we refuse His love and remain in the coldness of sin and opposition to Him and to other men then will His fire (by our own choice rather than His) become our everlasting enemy, and Love, instead of being our joy, will become our torment and our destruction.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Love Is, Men

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.124, New Directions Publishing

• 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.

  Thomas Merton

  Christian, Wisdom, Hate

• 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

  Keys, Understanding, Enemy

  Thomas Merton (2011). “The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters”, p.216, Macmillan

• God must be allowed the right to speak unpredictably.... We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend. We must find him in the pagan or we will lose him in our own selves, substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction.

  Thomas Merton

  Faith, Inspiration, Self

  Thomas Merton, Ernesto Cardenal (2017). “From the Monastery to the World: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal”, p.312, Counterpoint Press

• Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. 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. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action.

  Thomas Merton

  Life, Real, Keys

  Thomas Merton (2011). “The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters”, p.216, Macmillan

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