Quotes about God
They seem too technical, and I need not literature but the living God. Sitivit anima mea. The strong living God. I burn with the desire for His peace, His stability, His silence, the power and wisdom of His direct action, liberation from my own heaviness. I carry myself around like a ton weight.
— Thomas Merton
OUR discovery of God is, in a way, God's discovery of us. We cannot go to heaven to find Him because we have no way of knowing where heaven is or what it is. He comes down from heaven and finds us. He looks at us from the depths of His own infinite actuality, which is everywhere, and His seeing us gives us a new being and a new mind in which we also discover Him.
— Thomas Merton
It is true that God knows Himself in all the things that exist. He sees them, and it is because He sees them that they exist. It is because He loves them that they are good. His love in them is their intrinsic goodness. The value He sees in them is their value. In so far as He sees and loves them, all things reflect Him.
— Thomas Merton
God bridges the infinite distances between Himself and the spirits created to love Him, by supernatural missions of His own life. The Father, dwelling in the depths of all things and in my own depths, communicates to me His Word and His Spirit. Receiving them I am drawn into His own life and know God in His own Love, being one with Him in His own Son.
— Thomas Merton
All temperaments can serve as the material for ruin or for salvation. We must learn to see that our temperament is a gift of God, a talent with which we must trade until He comes.
— Thomas Merton
When the Love of God is in me, God is able to love you through me and you are able to love God through me. If my soul were closed to that love, God's love for you and your love for God and God's love for Himself in you and in me, would be denied the particular expression which it finds through me and through no other.
— Thomas Merton
When God tells you of a sickness, it is because He means, at the same time, to provide a remedy. It is the Devil who tells us that we are ill and taunts us for it, reminds us of our helplessness by making us even more helpless.
— Thomas Merton
Because God's love is in me, it can come to you from a different and special direction that would be closed if He did not live in me, and because His love is in you, it can come to me from a quarter from which it would not otherwise come. And because it is in both of us, God has greater glory.
— Thomas Merton
My advice to an ordinary religious man, supposing anyone were to desire my advice on this point, would be to avoid all arguments about religion, and especially about the existence of God.
— Thomas Merton
To give my freedom blindly to a being equal to or inferior to myself is to degrade myself and throw away my freedom. I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God. If
— Thomas Merton
If we are to pray well, we too must discover the Lord to whom we speak, and if we use the Psalms in our prayer we will stand a better chance of sharing in the discovery which lies hidden in their words for all generations. For God has willed to make Himself known to us in the mystery of the Psalms.
— Thomas Merton
St. Augustine adds that God has taught us to praise Him, in the Psalms, not in order that He may get something out of this praise, but in order that we may be made better by it.
— Thomas Merton