Thomas Merton Quotes About Soul

Quotes about: Soul

• Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another.

  Thomas Merton

  Peace, Hate, War

• 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

• Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.

  Thomas Merton

  Uplifting, Men, Soul

  Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton (2007). “Gandhi on Non-Violence”, p.106, New Directions Publishing

• Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

  Thomas Merton

  Love, Inspirational, Family

  "No Man is an Island".

• 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

• 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

• Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Art, Order

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.36, Shambhala Publications

• 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.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Oneness, Grace

  Thomas Merton (2003). “The New Man”, p.29, Bloomsbury Publishing

• If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Heart, Carpe Diem

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.30, Macmillan

• The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a man's life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Attitude, Men

  Thomas Merton (1960). “Spiritual Direction and Meditation”, p.16, Liturgical Press

• The psychological impotence of our enraged generation must be traced to the overwhelming accusation of insincerity which every man and woman has to confront, in the depths of his own soul, when he seeks to love merely for his own pleasure.And yet the men of our time do not love with enough courage to risk even discomfort or inconvenience.

  Thomas Merton

  Men, Soul, Risk

• Every moment and every event of everyman's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Wisdom, Men

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

• The soul of man, left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness. It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside and above itself. But when the light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in it.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Men, Light

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.211, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Place no hope in the feeling of assurance, in spiritual comfort. You may well have to get along without this. Place no hope in the inspirational preachers of Christian sunshine, who are able to pick you up and set you back on your feet and make you feel good for three or four days-until you fold up and collapse into despair. Self-confidence is a precious natural gift, a sign of health. But it is not the same thing as faith. Faith is much deeper, and it must be deep enough to subsist when we are weak, when we are sick, when our self-confidence is gone, when our self-respect is gone.

  Thomas Merton

  Christian, Spiritual, Sunshine

  Thomas Merton (2003). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.190, Shambhala Publications

• We know when we are following our vocation when our soul is set free from preoccupation with itself and is able to seek God and even to find Him, even though it may not appear to find Him. Gratitude and confidence and freedom from ourselves: these are signs that we have found our vocation and are living up to it even though everything else may seem to have gone wrong. They give us peace in any suffering. They teach us to laugh at despair. And we may have to.

  Thomas Merton

  Gratitude, Giving, Laughing

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.147, Shambhala Publications

• Creation was given to people as a clean window through which the light of God could shine into people's souls. Sun and moon, night and day, rain, sea, the crops, the flowering tree, all these things were transparent. They spoke to people not of themselves but only of Him who made them. Nature was symbolic. But the progressive degradation of humans led them further and further from this truth. Nature became opaque.

  Thomas Merton

  Nature, Rain, Moon

• I shall lead you through the loneliness, the solitude you will not understand; but it is my shortcut to your soul.

  Thomas Merton

  Loneliness, Soul, Solitude

• 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.

  Thomas Merton

  Real, Being Single, Being Alone

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.3, Shambhala Publications

• Consequently, the truth of God lives in our souls more by the power of superior moral courage than by the light of an eminent intelligence. Indeed, spiritual intelligence itself depends on the fortitude and patience with which we sacrifice ourselves for the truth, as it is communicated to our lives concretely in the providential will of God

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Wisdom, Sacrifice

  Thomas Merton (2002). “No Man Is an Island”, p.160, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The married man and the mother of a Christian family, if they are faithful to their obligations, will fulfill a mission that is as great as it is consoling: that of bringing into the world and forming young souls capable of happiness and love, souls capable of sanctification and transformation in Christ.

  Thomas Merton

  Christian, Mother, Men

• Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.

  Thomas Merton

  Art, Artist, Soul

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.36, Shambhala Publications

• There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude.

  Thomas Merton

  Soul, Solitude, Intimacy

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.175, Shambhala Publications

• Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Athlete, Soul

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.117, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• God has left sin in the world in order that there may be forgiveness: not only the secret forgiveness by which He Himself cleanses our souls, but the manifest forgiveness by which we have mercy on one another and so give expression to the fact that He is living, by His mercy, in our own hearts.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Heart, Expression

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.220, Shambhala Publications

• And it is in this darkness, when there is nothing left in us that can please or comfort our own minds, when we seem to be useless and worthy of all contempt, when we seem to have failed, when we seem to be destroyed and devoured, it is then that the deep and secret selfishness that is too close to us for us to identify is stripped away from our souls. It is in this darkness that we find liberty. It is in this abandonment that we are made strong. This is the night which empties us and makes us pure.

  Thomas Merton

  Strong, Night, Soul

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