Quotes about Devotion
Love is free; it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love's sake.
- 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
The simple, chaste lines of a monastic Church, built perhaps by unskilled hands in the wilderness, may well say infinitely more in praise of God than the pretentious enormities of costly splendor that are erected to be looked at rather than to be prayed in.
- Thomas Merton
A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.
- Thomas Merton
Above all, enter into the Church's liturgy and make the liturgical cycle part of your life—let its rhythm work its way into your body and soul.
- Thomas Merton
What I eventually found out was that as soon as I started to fast and deny myself pleasures and devote time to prayer and meditation and to the various exercises that belong to the religious life, I quickly got over all my bad health, and became sound and strong and immensely happy.
- Thomas Merton
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of heaven. And
- Thomas Merton
If I do His will as a free act of homage and adoration paid to a wisdom that I cannot see, His will itself becomes the life and substance and reality of my worship/ But if I do His will as a perfunctory adjustment of my own will to the unavoidable, my worship is hollow and without heart.
- 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
For if we have no real interest in praising Him, it shows that we have never realized who He is.
- Thomas Merton
But there is nothing to prevent a layman from taking just one Psalm a day, for instance in his night prayers, and reciting it thoughtfully, pausing to meditate on the lines which have the deepest meaning for him.
- Thomas Merton
He is most glorified by those in whom His mercy has produced the greatest love.
- Thomas Merton