Thomas Merton Quotes About Violence

Quotes about: Violence

• The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of contemporary violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activity neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

  Thomas Merton

  Roots, Demand, Want

• To some men peace merely means the liberty to exploit other people without fear of retaliation or interference. To others peace means the freedom to rob others without interruption. To still others it means the leisure to devour the goods of the earth without being compelled to interrupt their pleasures to feed those whom their greed is starving. And to practically everybody peace simply means the absence of any physical violence that might cast a shadow over lives devoted to the satisfaction of their animal appetites for comfort and pleasure.

  Thomas Merton

  Mean, Men, Animal

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.122, New Directions Publishing

• To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Peace, Demand

• Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Violence, Cease

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.129, Macmillan

• The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.

  Thomas Merton

  Peace, Ubuntu, Violence

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.207, Shambhala Publications

• Violence is essentially wordless. and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.

  Thomas Merton

  Communication, Broken, Violence

  Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton (1965). “Gandhi on Non-violence”, p.7, New Directions Publishing

• I am against war, against violence, against violent revolution, for peaceful settlement of differences, for nonviolent but nevertheless radical changes. Change is needed, and violence will not really change anything: at most it will only transfer power from one set of bull-headed authorities to another.

  Thomas Merton

  Peace, War, Differences

• The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Wisdom, Grace

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.129, Macmillan

• There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs; activism and overwork.

  Thomas Merton

  Fighting, Violence, Form

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”, p.81, Image

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