Quotes related to Proverbs 3:5-6
True simplicity implies love and trust—it does not expect to be derided and rejected, any more than it expects to be admired and praised.
— Thomas Merton
Those who imagine that they can discover special gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God's will and his grace.
— Thomas Merton
In all the situations of life the "will of God" comes to us not merely as an external dictate of impersonal law but above all as an interior invitation of personal love. Too often the conventional conception of "God's will" as a sphinx-like and arbitrary force bearing down upon us with implacable hostility, leads men to lose faith in a God they cannot find it possible to love.
— Thomas Merton
Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.
— Thomas Merton
THE most dangerous man in the world is the contemplative who is guided by nobody. He trusts his own visions. He obeys the attractions of an interior voice but will not listen to other men. He identifies the will of God with anything that makes him feel, within his own heart, a big, warm, sweet interior glow. The sweeter and the warmer the feeling is the more he is convinced of his own infallibility.
— Thomas Merton
Providence, that is the love of God, is very wise in turning away from the self-will of men, and in having nothing to do with them, and leaving them to their own devices, as long as they are intent on governing themselves, to show them to what depths of futility and sorrow their own helplessness is capable of dragging them.
— Thomas Merton
As soon as one is conscious of the presence of the Master, one must, in all passivity, abandon the work to Him.
— Thomas Merton
THE MONASTERY IS A SCHOOL—A SCHOOL IN WHICH WE learn from God how to be happy.
— Thomas Merton
And when I thought there was no God and no love and no mercy, you were leading me all the while into the midst of His love and His mercy and taking me, without my knowing anything about it, to the house that would hide me in the secret of His Face.
— Thomas Merton
To praise the contemplative life is not to reject every other form of life, but to seek a solid foundation for every other human striving. Without
— Thomas Merton
There is therefore one fundamental religious experience which the Psalms can all teach us: the peace that comes from submission to Gods will and from perfect confidence in Him.
— Thomas Merton
My chief care should not be to find pleasure or success, health or life or money or rest or even things like virtue and wisdom—still less their opposites, pain, failure, sickness, death. But in all that happens, my one desire and my one joy should be to know: "Here is the thing that God has willed for me. In this His love is found, and in accepting this I can give back His love to Him and give myself with it to Him. For in giving myself I shall find Him and He is life everlasting.
— Thomas Merton