Thomas Merton Quotes About Joy

Quotes about: Joy

• If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men--you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Money, Writing

  Thomas Merton, Robert Inchausti (2007). “Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing”, p.198, Shambhala Publications

• Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.

  Thomas Merton

  Disappointment, Eye, Heart

  Thomas Merton (1990). “The School of Charity: The Letters Of Thomas Merton On Religious Renewal & Spiritual Direction”, p.292, Macmillan

• It is almost impossible to overestimate the value of true humility and its power in the spiritual life. For the beginning of humility is the beginning of blessedness and the consummation of humility is the perfection of all joy. Humility contains in itself the answer to all the great problems of the life of the soul. It is the only key to faith, with which the spiritual life begins: for faith and humility are inseparable. In perfect humility all selfishness disappears and your soul no longer lives for itself or in itself for God: and it is lost and submerged in Him and transformed into Him.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Humility, Keys

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.181, New Directions Publishing

• In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your piece of heart. As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy, because you have begun to trade in unrealities and there is no joy in things that do not exist.

  Thomas Merton

  Heart, Humility, Thinking

• Ash Wednesday is full of joy...The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust.

  Thomas Merton

  Dust, Joy, Sorrow

• Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and joy you have not yet begun to live.

  Thomas Merton

  Journey, Differences, Joy

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

• The world of men has forgotten the joys of silence, the peace of solitude, which is necessary, to some extent, for the fullness of human living. Man cannot be happy for long unless he is in contact with the springs of spiritual life which are hidden in the depths of his own soul. If man is exiled constantly from his own home, locked out of his spiritual solitude, he ceases to be a true person.

  Thomas Merton

  Happy, Spiritual, Peace

• There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious unity and integrity is wisdom, the mother of us all, "natura naturans." There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness, and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being.

  Thomas Merton

  Mother, Nature, Integrity

• I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

  Thomas Merton

  Men, Race, People

• 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

• The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Sadness, Reality

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

• Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast.

  Thomas Merton

  Christian, Joy, Ashes

  Thomas Merton (2010). “Seasons of Celebration”, p.100, Macmillan

• 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

• The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Pain, Fall

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.92, Shambhala Publications

• For now, oh my God, it is to You alone that I can talk, because nobody else will understand. I cannot bring any other man on this earth into the cloud where I dwell in Your light, that is, Your darkness, where I am lost and abashed. I cannot explain to any other man the anguish which is Your joy nor the loss which is the Possession of You, nor the distance from all things which is the arrival in You, nor the death which is the birth in You because I do not know anything about it myself and all I know is that I wish it were over - I wish it were begun.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Distance, Loss

  Thomas Merton (1974). “A Thomas Merton Reader”, Image

• Let me rest in Your will and be silent. Then the light of Your joy will warm my life. Its fire will burn in my heart and shine for Your glory. This is what I live for. Amen, amen.

  Thomas Merton

  Heart, Fire, Light

  Thomas Merton (2002). “The Sign of Jonas”, p.89, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.

  Thomas Merton

  Joy, Intuition, Levels

  "Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation".

• This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.

  Thomas Merton

  Crucifixion Of Christ, Joy, Grace

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.158, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• We thank Him less by words than by the serene happiness of silent acceptance. It is our emptiness in the presence of His reality, our silence in the presence of His infinitely rich silence, our joy in the bosom of the serene darkness in which His light holds us absorbed, it is all this that praises Him.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Acceptance, Reality

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

• You are certainly one of the joys of life for all who have ever come within a mile of you.

  Thomas Merton

  Joy, Miles, Joy Of Life

  Thomas Merton (1989). “The Road to Joy: Letters to New and Old Friends”, p.71, Macmillan

• To be truly Catholic is not merely to be correct according to an abstractly universal standard of truth, but also and above all to be able to enter into the problems and the joys of all, to understand all, to be all things to all.

  Thomas Merton

  Joy, Catholic, Able

• See, see Who God is, see the glory of God, going up to Him out of this incomprehensible and infinite Sacrifice in which all history begins and ends, all individual lives begin and end, in which every story is told, and finished, and settled for joy or for sorrow: the one point of reference for all the truths that are outside of God, their center, their focus: Love.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Sacrifice, Focus

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.380, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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