Thomas Merton Quotes About Suffering

Quotes about: Suffering

• The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer.

  Thomas Merton

  Suffering Pain, World Suffering, People

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.116, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Hurt, Insignificant Things

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.116, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• ....it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Jesus, Essence

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.82, Shambhala Publications

• As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is the resetting of a body of broken bones. Even saints cannot live with saints on this earth without some anguish. There are two things which men can do about the pain of disunion with other men. They can love or they can hate.

  Thomas Merton

  Pain, Hate, Love Is

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.72, New Directions Publishing

• 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

• 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

• The friends of Job appear on the scene as advisers and "consolers," offering Job the fruits of their moral scientia. But when Job insists that his sufferings have no explanation and that he cannot discover the reason for them through conventional ethical concepts, his friends turn into accusers, and curse Job as a sinner. Thus, instead of consolers, they become torturers by virtue of their very morality, and in so doing, while claiming to be advocates of God, they act as instruments of the devil.

  Thomas Merton

  Jobs, Offering, Suffering

• To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, and no man is saved by his own sufferings. To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ; more, it is to know the love of Christ Who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Men, Order

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

• It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not what he ought to be. If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we do away with him altogether.

  Thomas Merton

  Hate, Men, Suffering

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”, p.142, Image

• We must suffer. Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason. It helps think clearly, judge sanely. It strengthens the action of our will.

  Thomas Merton

  Eye, Thinking, Giving

  "Thoughts in Solitude". Book by Thomas Merton, 1956.

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