{"author":"Thomas Merton","author_id":"Thomas+Merton","total_quotes":159,"quotes":[{"text":"Perhaps I am stronger than I think.","author":"Thomas Merton","tags":["self","confidence"],"id":5546,"author_id":"Thomas+Merton"},{"text":"Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for spiritual joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and spiritual joy you have not yet begun to live.","author":"Thomas Merton","tags":["joy","pleasure","spirituality"],"id":6563,"author_id":"Thomas+Merton"},{"text":"You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.","author":"Thomas Merton","tags":["courage","faith","hope","possibility"],"id":10187,"author_id":"Thomas+Merton"},{"text":"Those who refuse His mercy satisfy His justice in another way. Without His mercy, they cannot love Him. Without love for Him they cannot be 'justified' or 'made just'. That is to say: they cannot conform to Him Who is love. Those who have not received His mercy are in a state of injustice with regard to Him. It is their own injustice that is condemned by His justice. And in what does their injustice consist? In the refusal of His mercy. We come, in the end, to this basic paradox: that we owe it to God to receive from Him the mercy that is offered to us in Christ, and that to refuse this mercy is the summation of our 'injustice'. Clearly, then, only the mercy of God can make us just, in this supernatural sense, since the primary demand of God's justice upon us is that we receive His mercy.","author":"Thomas Merton","tags":["atheism","god-s-justice","repentance"],"id":10683,"author_id":"Thomas+Merton"},{"text":"The lights of prayer that make us imagine we are beginning to be angels are sometimes only signs that we are finally beginning to be men. We do not have a high enough opinion of our own nature. We think we are at the gates of heaven and we are only just beginning to come into our own realm as free and intelligent beings.","author":"Thomas Merton","tags":["prayer"],"id":11973,"author_id":"Thomas+Merton"},{"text":"Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.","author":"Thomas Merton","tags":["good","eyes","joy "],"id":12008,"author_id":"Thomas+Merton"},{"text":"When men live huddled together without true communication, there seems to be a greater sharing, and a more genuine communion. But this is not communion, only immersion in the general meaninglessness of countless slogans and clichés repeated over and over again so that in the end one listens without hearing and responds without thinking. The constant din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true communion almost impossible...","author":"Thomas Merton","tags":["communication","communion","conformity","society"],"id":17155,"author_id":"Thomas+Merton"},{"text":"In the use of force, one simplifies the situation by assuming that the evil to be overcome is clear-cut, definite, and irreversible. Hence there remains but one thing: to eliminate it. Any dialogue with the sinner, any question of the irreversibility of his act, only means faltering and failure. Failure to eliminate evil is itself a defeat. Anything that even remotely risks such defeat is in itself capitulation to evil. The irreversibility of evil then reaches out to contaminate even the tolerant thought of the hesitant crusader who, momentarily, doubts the total evil of the enemy he is about to eliminate. P. 21.","author":"Thomas Merton","tags":["evil","non-violence"],"id":18609,"author_id":"Thomas+Merton"},{"text":"The fact that our being necessarily demands to be expressed in action should not lead us to believe that as soon as we stop acting we cease to exist.We do not live merely to “do something” – no matter what. We do not live more fully merely by doing something more, seeing more, tasting more and experiencing more than we ever have before.Everything depends on the quality of our acts and experiences. A multitude of badly performed actions and experiences only half-lived exhausts and depletes our being.By doing things badly we make ourselves less real. This growing unreality cannot help but make us unhappy and fill us with a sense of guilt.There are times then when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all, we simply have to sit back awhile and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all.We must first recover the possession of our own being before we can act or taste or experience reality.","author":"Thomas Merton","tags":["spirituality"],"id":26281,"author_id":"Thomas+Merton"},{"text":"Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.","author":"Thomas Merton","tags":["humility","neurosis","virtue"],"id":27233,"author_id":"Thomas+Merton"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":159,"pages":16,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}