Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Thomas Merton, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Thomas Merton quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 590 Thomas Merton quotes for you to read and share.

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Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy. -- Thomas Merton
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It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception. -- Thomas Merton
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What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others. -- Thomas Merton
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One opens the inner doors of one's heart to the infinite silences of the Spirit, out of whose abysses love wells up without fail and gives itself to all. -- Thomas Merton
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The gift of love is the gift of the power and capacity to love, and therefore, to give love with full effect is also to receive it. So love can only be kept by being given away, and it can only be given perfectly when it is also received. -- Thomas Merton
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Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good ... -- Thomas Merton
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Good Shepherd, You have a wild and crazy sheep in love with thorns and brambles. But please don't get tired of looking for me! I know You won't. For You have found me. All I have to do is stay found. -- Thomas Merton
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God, have mercy on me in the blindness in which I hope I am seeking You! -- Thomas Merton
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Solitude is so necessary both for society and for the individual that when society fails to provide sufficient solitude to develop the inner life of the persons who compose it, they rebel and seek false solitudes. -- Thomas Merton
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When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well. -- Thomas Merton
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Where self-interest is the bond, The friendship is dissolved When calamity comes. Where Tao is the bond, Friendship is made perfect By calamity. -- Thomas Merton
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Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true. -- Thomas Merton
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A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions, is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of "choice" when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses. -- Thomas Merton
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The only thing that can save the world from complete moral collapse is a spiritual revolution. Christianity, by its very nature, demands such a revolution. If Christians would all live up to what they profess to believe, the revolution would happen. -- Thomas Merton
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The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God. -- Thomas Merton
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For the sinful self is not my real self, it is not the self YOU have wanted for me, only the self that I have wanted : And I no longer want this false self. But now, Father, I come to You in your own Son's self ... and it is He Who Presents me to You. -- Thomas Merton
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To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. -- Thomas Merton
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instead of becoming a strong and ardent and generous Catholic, I simply slipped into the ranks of the millions of tepid and dull and sluggish and indifferent Christians who live a life that is still half animal, and who barely put up a struggle to keep the breath of grace alive in their souls. -- Thomas Merton
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God Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true self. -- Thomas Merton
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It is when we insist most firmly on everyone else being "reasonable" that we become ourselves, unreasonable. -- Thomas Merton
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From the moment you put a piece of bread in your mouth you are part of the world. Who grew the wheat? Who made the bread? Where did it come from? You are in relationship with all who brought it to the table. We are least separate and most in common when we eat and drink. -- Thomas Merton
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In an age where there is much talk about "being yourself," I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else. -- Thomas Merton
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Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections less by seeing than by fruitive love. -- Thomas Merton
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The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude. -- Thomas Merton
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I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face. -- Thomas Merton
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If it is awakened, it communicates a new life to the intelligence in which it lives, so that it becomes a living awareness of itself: and this awareness is not so much something that we ourselves have, as something that we are. It is a new and indefinable quality of our living being. -- Thomas Merton
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The meaning of life is found in openness to being and "being present" in full awareness. -- Thomas Merton
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Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm. -- Thomas Merton
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The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order. -- Thomas Merton
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If we are to love sincerely, and with simplicity, we must first of all overcome the fear of not being loved. -- Thomas Merton
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Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost -- Thomas Merton
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If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision. -- Thomas Merton
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Let me rest in Your will and be silent. Then the light of Your joy will warm my life. Its fire will burn in my heart and shine for Your glory. This is what I live for. Amen, amen. -- Thomas Merton
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We who claim to love peace and justice must always be careful that we do not use our righteousness to provoke the violent, and in this way bring about the conflict for which we, too, like other men, are hungering in secret, and with suppressed barbarity. -- Thomas Merton
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It is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning. -- Thomas Merton
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Love is ... like a spring coming up out of the ground of our own depths. "I am gift." All that I am is something that's given, and given freely. Being doesn't cost anything. There's no price tag, no strings attached. -- Thomas Merton
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One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men. -- Thomas Merton
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The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done -- Thomas Merton
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By which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves. All -- Thomas Merton
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The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer. -- Thomas Merton
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Love is an intensification of life. -- Thomas Merton
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Oh, America, how I began to love your country! What miles of silences God has made in you for contemplation! If only people realized what all your mountains and forests are really for! -- Thomas Merton
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What we have to be is what we are. -- Thomas Merton
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Monastic prayer begins not so much with "considerations" as with a "return to the heart," finding one's deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being -- Thomas Merton
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Faith is the door to the full inner life of the Church, a life which includes not only access to an authoritative teaching but above all to a deep personal experience which is at once unique and yet shared by the whole Body of Christ, in the Spirit of Christ. -- Thomas Merton
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Curiously, the most serious religious people, or the most concerned scholars, those who constantly read the Bible as a matter of professional or pious duty, can often manage to evade a radically involved dialogue with the book they are questioning. -- Thomas Merton
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Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular. -- Thomas Merton
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Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God. -- Thomas Merton
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As a matter of fact, it is often harder to manifest the good that is in us than the evil. -- Thomas Merton
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But precisely this illusion that everything is "clear" is what is blinding us all. It is a serious temptation, and it is a subtle form of pride and worldly love of power and revenge. -- Thomas Merton
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Violence is essentially wordless. and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down. -- Thomas Merton
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It is as if in creating us God asked a question, and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the question, so that the contemplative is at the same time, question and answer. -- Thomas Merton
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What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer? -- Thomas Merton
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By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet. -- Thomas Merton
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The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me. -- Thomas Merton
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True happiness is not found in any other reward than that of being united with God. If I seek some other reward besides God Himself, I may get my reward but I cannot be happy. -- Thomas Merton
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The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. p. 22 -- Thomas Merton
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A man becomes a solitary at the moment when, no matter what may be his external surroundings, he is suddenly aware of his own inalienable solitude and sees that he will never be anything but solitary. -- Thomas Merton
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Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything. -- Thomas Merton
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There is in every intellect a natural exigency for a true concept of God: we are born with the thirst to know and to see Him, and therefore it cannot be otherwise. -- Thomas Merton
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How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all. -- Thomas Merton
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By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence. -- Thomas Merton
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As soon as one is conscious of the presence of the Master, one must, in all passivity, abandon the work to Him. -- Thomas Merton
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Every man becomes the image of the God he adores.
He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead.
He who loves corruption rots.
He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow.
He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing. -- Thomas Merton
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The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth. -- Thomas Merton
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Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence. -- Thomas Merton
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Is the basic teaching of Buddhism - on ignorance, deliverance and enlightenment - really life-denying, or is it rather the same kind of life-affirming liberation that we find in the Good News of Redemption, the Gift of the Spirit, and the New Creation? -- Thomas Merton
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The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist ... It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door. -- Thomas Merton
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But any fool knows that you don't need money to get enjoyment out of life. -- Thomas Merton
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A man can radically change his life and attain to a deeper meaning, a more perfect integration, a more complete fulfillment, a more total liberty of spirit than are possible in the routines of a purely active existence centered on money-making. -- Thomas Merton
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There is a subtle but inescapable connection between the "sacred" attitude and the acceptance of one's in most self. -- Thomas Merton
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The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical. -- Thomas Merton
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Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God. -- Thomas Merton
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I can depend less and less on my own power and sense of direction ... It is so strange to advance backwards and get where you are going in a totally unexpected way -- Thomas Merton
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If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell. -- Thomas Merton
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Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, the perfection of His love. -- Thomas Merton
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Meditation is one of the ways in which the spiritual man keeps himself awake. -- Thomas Merton
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Christians are now wide open to Asian religions, ready, in the words of Vatican II, to "acknowledge, preserve and promote the spiritual and moral goods" found among them. -- Thomas Merton
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Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters. -- Thomas Merton
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The first step toward finding God
who is truth
is to discover the truth about myself; and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error -- Thomas Merton
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The poorest man in a religious community is not necessarily the one who has the fewest objects assigned to him for his use. Poverty is not merely a matter of not having "things." It is an attitude which leads us to renounce some of the advantages which come from the use of things. -- Thomas Merton
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The importance of detachment from things, the importance of poverty, is that we are supposed to be free from things that we might prefer to people. Wherever things have become more important than people, we are in trouble. That is the crux of the whole matter. -- Thomas Merton
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Every moment and every event of everyman's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. -- Thomas Merton
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If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us. -- Thomas Merton
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Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation. -- Thomas Merton
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There are so many voices heard today asserting that one should "have religion" or "believe," but all they mean is that one should associate himself, "sign up" with some religious group. Stand up and be counted. As if religion were somehow primarily a matter of gregariousness ... -- Thomas Merton
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The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world. -- Thomas Merton
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If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology. For religion goes beyond words and actions, and attains to the ultimate Truth only in silence and Love. -- Thomas Merton
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One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us. -- Thomas Merton
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And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey. -- Thomas Merton
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What would have been the good of my being plunged into a lot of naked suffering and emotional crisis without any prayer, any Sacrament to stabilize and order it, and make some kind of meaning out of it? -- Thomas Merton
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To separate meditation from prayer, reading and contemplation is to falsify our picture of the monastic way of prayer. In proportion as meditation takes on a more contemplative character, we see that it is not only a means to an end, but also has something of the nature of an end. -- Thomas Merton
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As long as I am content to know that He is infinitely greater than I, and that I cannot know Him unless He shows himself to me, I will have Peace, and He will be near me and in me, and I will rest in Him. -- Thomas Merton
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To love blindly is to love selfishly, because the goal of such love is not the real advantage of the beloved but only the exercise of love in our own souls. -- Thomas Merton
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As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper, so the mystery of Christ in the Gospel concentrates the rays of God's light and fire to a point to set fire to the human spirit. -- Thomas Merton
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We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human and visible means, nor rests in any visible end. He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination. -- Thomas Merton
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Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness. -- Thomas Merton
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To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair. -- Thomas Merton
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Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another. -- Thomas Merton
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The things I thought were so important
because of the effort I put into them
have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered. -- Thomas Merton
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It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister. -- Thomas Merton
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There were only a few shepherds at the first Bethlehem. The ox and the donkey understood more of the first Christmas than the high priests in Jerusalem. And it is the same today. -- Thomas Merton
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We cannot possess the truth fully until it has entered into the very substance of our life by good habits, and by a certain perfection of moral activity. -- Thomas Merton
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If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. -- Thomas Merton
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I am earth, earth My heart's love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected -- Thomas Merton
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All things are yours and you are Christ's - and Christ is God's. If we live, we live unto God. If we die, we die unto God - whether we live or die, we are God's possession." What more could anyone ask? -- Thomas Merton
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For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another. If my heart does not first belong to me, how can I give it to another? -- Thomas Merton
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We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full. -- Thomas Merton
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Love triumphs, at least in this life, not by eliminating evil once for all, but by resisting and overcoming it anew every day. -- Thomas Merton
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The point where you become free not to kill, not to exploit, not to destroy, not to compete, because you are no longer afraid of death or the devil or poverty or failure. If you discover this nakedness, you'd better keep it private. People don't like it. -- Thomas Merton
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What every man looks for in life is his own salvation and the salvation of the men he lives with. By salvation I mean first of all the full discovery of who he himself really is. -- Thomas Merton
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The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places. -- Thomas Merton
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I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may mean? I myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both. -- Thomas Merton
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There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him. -- Thomas Merton
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Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism. -- Thomas Merton
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A man is enriched by the faith, and if you will by the hope and humility, with which he calls on the most sweet Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ; and he is enriched also by peace and love. For these are truly a three-stemmed life-giving tree planted by God. -- Thomas Merton
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I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war. -- Thomas Merton
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It is a terrible thing to think of the grace that is wasted in this world, -- Thomas Merton
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I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to. -- Thomas Merton
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The deepest of level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless ... beyond speech ... beyond concept. -- Thomas Merton
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The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. -- Thomas Merton
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Be still:
There is no longer any need of comment.
It was a lucky wind
That blew away his halo with his cares,
A lucky sea that drowned his reputation. -- Thomas Merton
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You pray best when the mirror of your soul is empty of every image except the Image of the Invisible Father. -- Thomas Merton
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O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't. -- Thomas Merton
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If in the men who are supposed to be good they only see a "virtue" which is effectively less vital and less interesting than their own vices they will conclude that virtue has no meaning and will cling to what they have although they hate it. -- Thomas Merton
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Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. -- Thomas Merton
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The logic of the poet - that is, the logic of language or the experience itself - develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant. -- Thomas Merton
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The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself. -- Thomas Merton
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Get warm any way you can, and love God and pray. -- Thomas Merton
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Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train. -- Thomas Merton
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Take more time, cover less ground. -- Thomas Merton
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The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to him. -- Thomas Merton
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Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things. -- Thomas Merton
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May we all grow in grace and peace and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us. -- Thomas Merton
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We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness. -- Thomas Merton
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Thinking prevents the unconscious from speaking. -- Thomas Merton
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Love is its own reward ... -- Thomas Merton
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Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. -- Thomas Merton
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The man who is able to hate strongly and with a quiet conscience is one who is complacently blind to all unworthiness in himself and serenely capable of seeing all his own wrongs in someone else. -- Thomas Merton
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Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself. -- Thomas Merton
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At Cincinnati, where we arrived about dawn, I asked the Traveller's Aid girl the name of some Catholic churches, and got in a taxi to go to St. Francis Xavier's, where -- Thomas Merton
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In a world of noise, confusion and conflict it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace. In such places love can blossom. -- Thomas Merton
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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
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Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found. -- Thomas Merton
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To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God. -- Thomas Merton
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Prayer is an expression of who we are ... We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment. -- Thomas Merton
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We should not, however, judge the value of our meditation by "how we feel." A hard and apparently fruitless meditation may in fact be much more valuable than one that is easy, happy, enlightened and apparently a big success. -- Thomas Merton
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In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. -- Thomas Merton
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God has left sin in the world in order that there may be forgiveness: not only the secret forgiveness by which He Himself cleanses our souls, but the manifest forgiveness by which we have mercy on one another and so give expression to the fact that He is living, by His mercy, in our own hearts. -- Thomas Merton
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Ultimately faith is the only key to the universe. The final meaning of human existence, and the answers to the questions on which all our happiness depends cannot be found in any other way. -- Thomas Merton
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Cupidity ... takes created things for ends in themselves, which they are not. The will that seeks rest in creatures for their own sake stops on the way to its true end, terminates in a value which does not exist, and thus frustrates all its deepest capacities for happiness and peace. -- Thomas Merton
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If you found God with great ease, perhaps it's not God that you have found. -- Thomas Merton
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Hence monastic prayer, especially meditation and contemplative prayer, is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him whom we have found, who loves us, who is near to us, who comes to us to draw us to himself. -- Thomas Merton
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The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God's will and his grace. -- Thomas Merton
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A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy. -- Thomas Merton
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The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God. -- Thomas Merton
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Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real. -- Thomas Merton
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The only influence that can really upset the injustice and iniquity of men is the power that breathes in the Christian tradition, renewing our participation in the Life that is the Light of men. -- Thomas Merton
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Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist. -- Thomas Merton
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Into this world, this demented inn
in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ comes uninvited. -- Thomas Merton
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Love, then, must be true to the ones we love and to ourselves, and also to its own laws. I cannot be true to myself if I pretend to have more in common than I actually have with someone whom I may like for a selfish and unworthy reason. -- Thomas Merton
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The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods. -- Thomas Merton
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The first step in identifying "heresy" is to refuse all identifications with the subjective intuitions and experience of the "heretic," and to see his words only in an impersonal realm in which there is no dialogue - in which dialogue is denied a priori. -- Thomas Merton
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To be a saint is to be yourself. -- Thomas Merton
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Suzuki also frequently quotes a sentence of Eckhart's: "The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me" (Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 50) as an exact expression of what Zen means by Prajna. -- Thomas Merton
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For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point vierge between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs. -- Thomas Merton
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A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly. -- Thomas Merton
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our material riches unfortunately imply a spiritual, cultural, and moral poverty that are perhaps far greater than we see. -- Thomas Merton
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Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. -- Thomas Merton
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The Breviary was hard to learn, and every step was labor and confusion, not to mention the mistakes and perplexities I got myself into. However, -- Thomas Merton
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Today will never come again. -- Thomas Merton
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Life is not accomplishing some special work but attaining to a degree of consciousness and inner freedom which is beyond all works and attainments. -- Thomas Merton
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Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things. -- Thomas Merton
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Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand. -- Thomas Merton
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God has brought me to Kentucky ... the precise place he has chosen for my sanctification. -- Thomas Merton
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The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love, and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world. -- Thomas Merton
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We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen. -- Thomas Merton
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[Bells] speak to us of our freedom, which responsibilities and transient cares make us forget. -- Thomas Merton
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Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience. -- Thomas Merton
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A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying [God]. It "consents," so to speak, to [God's] creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree -- Thomas Merton
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The Hindus are not looking for us to send them men who will build schools and hospitals, although those things are good and useful in themselves
and perhaps very badly needed in India: they want to know if we have any saints to send them. -- Thomas Merton
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The reality of a person is a deep and hidden thing, buried not only in the invisible recesses of man's own metaphysical secrecy but in the secrecy of God Himself. -- Thomas Merton
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CII ABBOT PASTOR said: Just as bees are driven out by smoke, and their honey is taken away from them, so a life of ease drives out the fear of the Lord from man's soul and takes away all his good works. -- Thomas Merton
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He excels in giving irrelevant information. -- Thomas Merton
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The great thing, and the only thing, is to adore and praise GOD. -- Thomas Merton
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For it seems to me that the first responsibility of a man of faith is to make his faith really part of his own life, not by rationalizing it but by living it. -- Thomas Merton
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Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation. -- Thomas Merton
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Silence is not broken by speech, but by the anxiety to be heard. -- Thomas Merton
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I see no contradiction between Buddhism and Christianity ... I intend to become as good a Buddhist as I can. -- Thomas Merton
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I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me. -- Thomas Merton
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When Knowledge Went North (excerpt)
As for us,
We came nowhere near being right,
Since we have the answers.
"For he who knows does not speak
He who speaks does not know"
And "The Wise Man gives instruction
Without the use of speech. -- Thomas Merton
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Charity is without fear: having given all that it has, it has nothing left to lose. -- Thomas Merton
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The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both. -- Thomas Merton
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No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. -- Thomas Merton
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Look for Him unless we have already found Him, and we cannot find Him unless he has first found us. We cannot begin to seek Him without a special gift of His grace, yet if we wait for grace to move us, before beginning to seek Him will probably never begin. -- Thomas Merton
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The hypostatic union, or the union of the divine and human natures in the One Person of the Word, the God-Man, Jesus Christ, was not only a truth of the greatest, most revolutionary, and most existential actuality, but it was the central truth of all being and all history. -- Thomas Merton
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We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God. -- Thomas Merton
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Until all titles are taken away
Events are finally obscure forever
You wake and wonder
Whose case history you composed
As your confessions are filed
In the dialect
Of bureaux and electrons -- Thomas Merton
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We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real ... and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. (295) -- Thomas Merton
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We must make the choices that enable us
to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves. -- Thomas Merton
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Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life. -- Thomas Merton
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My life is ... a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though 1 were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the love and protection of Him who guides me. -- Thomas Merton
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This act of total surrender is not merely a fantastic intellectual and mystical gamble; it is something much more serious. It is an act of love for this unseen person, who, in the very gift of love by which we surrender ourselves to his reality also makes his presence known to us. -- Thomas Merton
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My true personality will be fulfilled in the Mystical Christ in this one way above all, that through me, Christ and His Spirit will be able to love you and all men and God the Father in a way that would be possible in no one else. Love -- Thomas Merton
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Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life. -- Thomas Merton
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If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit. -- Thomas Merton
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We do not want to be beginners [at prayer]. but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life! -- Thomas Merton
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If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. -- Thomas Merton
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Suppose that my "poverty" be a secret hunger for spiritual riches: suppose that by pretending to empty myself, pretending to be silent, I am really trying to cajole God into enriching me with some experience--what then? Then everything becomes a distraction. -- Thomas Merton
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Contemplation is the loving sense of this life, this presence and this eternity. -- Thomas Merton
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There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues. -- Thomas Merton
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Action is the stream, and contemplation is the spring. -- Thomas Merton
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People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell. -- Thomas Merton
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Whose silence are you? -- Thomas Merton
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The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives. -- Thomas Merton
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The madman runs to the East and his keeper runs to the East, both are running to the East. Their purposes differ. -- Thomas Merton
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Love winter when the plant says nothing. -- Thomas Merton
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He's not a safe safe or a tame God, securely lodged behind the bars of a distant Heaven; He has the most annoying manner of showing up when we least want Him; of confronting us in the strangest ways. -- Thomas Merton
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If you have never had any distractions you don't know how to pray. -- Thomas Merton
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What is the good of religion without personal spiritual direction? -- Thomas Merton
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the humble man takes whatever there is in the world that helps him to find God and leaves the rest aside. He -- Thomas Merton
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There are ways that seem to men to be good, the end whereof is in the depths of hell. -- Thomas Merton
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A gentle sense of humor will be alert to detect anything that savors of a pious 'act' on the part of the penitent. -- Thomas Merton
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Stop asking yourself questions that have no meaning. Or if they have, you'll find out when you need to
find out both the questions and the answers. -- Thomas Merton
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The mercy of God demands to be known and recognized and set apart from everything else and praised and adored in joy. -- Thomas Merton
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The distinctive characteristic of religious meditation is that it is a search for truth which springs from love and which seeks to possess the truth not only by knowledge but also by love. -- Thomas Merton
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Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God. -- Thomas Merton
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("A classic is a book that remains in print" - Mark Van Doren) -- Thomas Merton
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It seems to me that the darkness that has troubled you ... comes from one very serious source. Without wanting to be in conflict with the truth and with the will of God, we are actually going against God's will and His teaching. -- Thomas Merton
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The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. -- Thomas Merton
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Some men turn away from all this cheap emotion with a kind of heroic despair ... But this too can be an error. For if our emotions really die in the desert, our humanity dies with them. -- Thomas Merton
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Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk's life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do. -- Thomas Merton
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Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives. -- Thomas Merton
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In the end, no one can seek God unless he has already begun to find him. -- Thomas Merton
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If we seek paradise outside ourselves, we cannot have paradise in our hearts. -- Thomas Merton
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It can be said, without fear of error, that our meditation is as good as our faith. -- Thomas Merton
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Nevertheless, every day love corners me somewhere and surrounds me with peace without my having to look very far or very hard or do anything special. God -- Thomas Merton
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We discover our true selves in love. -- Thomas Merton
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We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others. -- Thomas Merton
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The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little. -- Thomas Merton
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For true humility is, in a way, a very real despair: despair of myself, in order that I may hope entirely in You. -- Thomas Merton
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There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics. -- Thomas Merton
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Love is a special way of being alive. -- Thomas Merton
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We put words between ourselves and things. -- Thomas Merton
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Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it. -- Thomas Merton
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Confucious and the Madman (excerpt)

The cinnamon tree is edible: so it is cut down!
The lacquer tree is profitable: they maim it.
Every man knows how useful it is to be useful.
No one seems to know
How useful it is to be useless. -- Thomas Merton
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The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing. -- Thomas Merton
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must become convinced and penetrated by the realization that without my love for them they may perhaps not achieve the things God has willed for them. -- Thomas Merton
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The peculiar grace of a shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it. -- Thomas Merton
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You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer. -- Thomas Merton
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You are certainly one of the joys of life for all who have ever come within a mile of you. -- Thomas Merton
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And of course most non-Catholics imagine that the Church is immensely rich, and that all Catholic institutions make money hand over fist, and that all the money is stored away somewhere to buy gold and silver dishes for the Pope and cigars for the College of Cardinals. -- Thomas Merton
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God makes us ask ourselves questions most often when He intends to resolve them. He gives us needs that He alone can satisfy, and awakens capacities that He means to fulfill. Any perplexity is liable to be a spiritual gestation, leading to a new birth and a mystical regeneration. -- Thomas Merton
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effort is necessary, enlightened, well-directed and sustained. -- Thomas Merton
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We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us. -- Thomas Merton
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October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful. -- Thomas Merton
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We are already ONE. We just think we are separate. -- Thomas Merton
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Love is our true destiny. -- Thomas Merton
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If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him. -- Thomas Merton
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Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them. -- Thomas Merton
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We must slow down to a human tempo and we'll begin to have time to listen. -- Thomas Merton
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To hope is to risk frustration. Make up your mind to risk frustration. -- Thomas Merton
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Spread abroad the name of Jesus in humility and with a meek heart; show him your feebleness, and he will become your strength. -- Thomas Merton
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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
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All theology is a kind of birthday
Each one who is born
Comes into the world as a question
For which old answers
Are not sufficient ... -- Thomas Merton
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I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is. -- Thomas Merton
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Imagination has the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new. -- Thomas Merton
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Lovely morning! How lovely life can be! -- Thomas Merton
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When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable. -- Thomas Merton
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My best writing has always been in journals. -- Thomas Merton
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Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a savior. -- Thomas Merton
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Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love ... -- Thomas Merton
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Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it! O -- Thomas Merton
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We are not capable of union with one another on the deepest level until the inner self in each one of us is sufficiently awakened to confront the inmost spirit of the other. -- Thomas Merton
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If a writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never be able to write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people you have got to make up your mind to write things that some men will condemn. -- Thomas Merton
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Man is not at peace with his fellow man because he is not at peace with himself. He is not at peace with himself because he is not at peace with God. -- Thomas Merton
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We assume that others are receiving the kind of appreciation we want for ourselves, and we proceed on the assumption that since we are not loveable as we are, we must become lovable under false pretenses, as if we were something better than we are. -- Thomas Merton
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But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. -- Thomas Merton
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Coercion from outside, strong temperamental inclinations and passions within ourselves, do nothing to effect the essence of our freedom. They simply define its action by imposing certain limits on it. -- Thomas Merton
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And in a sense, this terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it. -- Thomas Merton
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Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it. -- Thomas Merton
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What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous. -- Thomas Merton
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True encounter with Christ liberates something within us, a power we did not know we had, a capacity to grow and change. -- Thomas Merton
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If we examine ourselves carefully we shall see most of us have an enormous amount of unfinished business ... We have to be free so that we can just step across the line and that's it. That is what real freedom is. -- Thomas Merton
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How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me? -- Thomas Merton
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We cannot find Him unless we know we need Him. We forget this need when we take a self-sufficient pleasure in our own good works. The poor and helpless are the first to find Him, Who came to seek and to save that which was lost. -- Thomas Merton
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For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be. -- Thomas Merton
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Saints are what they are not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everyone else. -- Thomas Merton
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Struggle is in my heart all week. My own moral conflict never ceases. Knowing I cannot and must not simply submit to the standards imposed on me, and merely conform as "they" would like. This I am convinced is wrong - but the pressure never ceases. -- Thomas Merton
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Those who are not grateful soon begin to complain of everything. -- Thomas Merton
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There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us. -- Thomas Merton
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But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others. -- Thomas Merton
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A contemplative is not one who takes his prayer seriously, but one who takes God seriously, who is famished for truth, who seeks to live in generous simplicity, in the spirit. An ardent and sincere humility is the best protection for his life of prayer. -- Thomas Merton
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You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt. -- Thomas Merton
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Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward. -- Thomas Merton
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The art of our time, sacred art included, will necessarily be characterized by a certain poverty, grimness and roughness which correspond to the violent realities of a cruel age. -- Thomas Merton
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How do you expect to arrive at the end of your journey if you take the road to another man's city?(100) -- Thomas Merton
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We are not converted only once in our lives but many times and this endless series of conversions and inner revolutions leads to our transformation. -- Thomas Merton
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Ash Wednesday is full of joy ... The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust. -- Thomas Merton
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The simplicity that all this presupposes is not easy to attain. I find that my life constantly threatens to become complex and divisive. A life of prayer is basically a very simple life. This simplicity, however, is the result of asceticism and effort: it is not a spontaneous simplicity. -- Thomas Merton
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Love is not a mere emotion or sentiment. It is the lucid and ardent responses of the whole person to a value that is revealed to him as perfect. -- Thomas Merton
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If you persist in trying To attain what is never attained (It is Tao's gift!) If you persist in making effort To obtain what effort cannot get; If you persist in reasoning About what cannot be understood, You will be destroyed By the very thing you seek. -- Thomas Merton
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I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. -- Thomas Merton
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Hullo, Brother," I said. He recognized me, glanced at the suitcase and said: "This time have you come to stay?" "Yes, Brother, if you'll pray for me," I said. Brother nodded, and raised his hand to close the window. "That's what I've been doing," he said, "praying for you. -- Thomas Merton
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Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say. -- Thomas Merton
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To be alone by being part of the universe-fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without. -- Thomas Merton
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The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God. -- Thomas Merton
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On Pride: This sickness is most dangerous when it succeeds in looking like humility. When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless. -- Thomas Merton
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To Serve the God of Love one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to love in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one's neighbor. -- Thomas Merton
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The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them that the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which "God is satisfied," and after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men. -- Thomas Merton
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How could this fatuous, emotional thing be without beginning and without end, the creator of all? I had taken the dead letter of Scripture at its very deadest, and it had killed me, according to the saying of St. Paul: "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life -- Thomas Merton
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Contemplation does not arrive at reality after a process of deduction, but by an intuitive awakening in which our free and personal reality becomes fully alive to its own existential depths, which open out into the mystery of God. For -- Thomas Merton
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The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them. -- Thomas Merton
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But the pride of those who live as if they believed they were better than anyone else is rooted in a secret failure to believe in their own goodness. -- Thomas Merton
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Mistake to suppose that mere good will is, by itself, a sufficient guarantee that all our efforts will finally attain to a good result. Serious mistakes can be made, even with the greatest good will. -- Thomas Merton
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The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed identity. -- Thomas Merton
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Modern man believes he is fruitful and productive when his ego is aggressively affirmed, when he is visibly active, and when his action produces obvious results. -- Thomas Merton
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The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free. -- Thomas Merton
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When we are strong, we are always much greater than the things that happen to us. -- Thomas Merton
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I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and happening, and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it. -- Thomas Merton
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Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another. -- Thomas Merton
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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
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One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. -- Thomas Merton
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It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God. -- Thomas Merton
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The evil in the world is all of our own making, and it proceeds entirely from our ruthless, senseless, wasteful, destructive, and suicidal neglect of our own being. -- Thomas Merton
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(Excerpt from Leaving Things Alone)
You train your eye and your vision lusts after colour. You train your ear, and you long for delightful sound. You delight in doing good, and your natural kindness is blown out of shape. You delight in righteousness, and you become righteous beyond all reason. -- Thomas Merton
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Misplaced effort in the spiritual life often consists in stubbornly insisting upon compulsive routines which seem to us to be necessary because they accord with our own short-sighted notions. -- Thomas Merton
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As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination. -- Thomas Merton
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Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire. -- Thomas Merton
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The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom. -- Thomas Merton
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Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him. -- Thomas Merton
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One has to be alone, under the sky, Before everything falls into place and one finds his or her own place in the midst of it all. We have to have the humility to realize ourselves as part of nature. -- Thomas Merton
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Stop thinking and start looking. -- Thomas Merton
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Books that speak like God speak with too much authority to entertain us. Those that speak like good men hold us by their human charm; we grow by finding ourselves in them. -- Thomas Merton
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Everything that happens to the poor, the meek, the desolate, the mourners, the despised, happens to Christ. -- Thomas Merton
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It is not speaking that breaks our silence, but the anxiety to be heard. The words of the proud man impose silence on all others, so that he alone may be heard. The humble man speaks only in order to be spoken to. -- Thomas Merton
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The love of pleasure is destined by its very nature to defeat itself and end in frustration. -- Thomas Merton
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If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest God, does not bless our work. -- Thomas Merton
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It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are. -- Thomas Merton
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A faith that is afraid of other people is not faith at all. -- Thomas Merton
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In meditative prayer, one thinks and speaks not only with the mind and lips, but in a certain sense with one's whole being ... All good meditative prayer is a conversation of our entire self to God. -- Thomas Merton
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Bonum est praestolari cum silentio salutare Dei. ("It is good to wait in silence for the salvation of God.") -- Thomas Merton
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Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God: for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice and mediocrity and materialism and selfishness that have chilled his faith. -- Thomas Merton
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My God, I pray better to you by breathing. I pray better to you by walking than by talking. -- Thomas Merton
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Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself. -- Thomas Merton
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Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers. -- Thomas Merton
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Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good. -- Thomas Merton
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We love the things we pretend to laugh at. -- Thomas Merton
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The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will. -- Thomas Merton
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For power can guarantee the interests of some men but it can never foster the good of man. Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all the others. Only love can attain and preserve the good of all. Any claim to build the security of all on force is a manifest imposture. -- Thomas Merton
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One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. -- Thomas Merton
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If you find God with great ease, perhaps it is not God you have found. -- Thomas Merton
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Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible. -- Thomas Merton
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The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent. -- Thomas Merton
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The problem today is that there are no deserts, only dude ranches. -- Thomas Merton
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I find I serve the world best by keeping my distance and freedom. -- Thomas Merton
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Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains. -- Thomas Merton
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For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. -- Thomas Merton
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Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in the smoke of confabulation. There can be no peace on earth without the kind of inner change that brings man back to his "right mind." p. 31 -- Thomas Merton
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Live, said Paul, -- Thomas Merton
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Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness. -- Thomas Merton
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For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one's own contingent self, cannot exist where there is no contingent self to which anything can be attributed. -- Thomas Merton
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If what most people take for granted were really true - if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now. If -- Thomas Merton
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We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of others and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us. -- Thomas Merton
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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
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One came out of the church with a kind of comfortable and satisfied feeling that something had been done that needed to be done, and that was all I knew about it. -- Thomas Merton
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something to be attained by special virtuous techniques, the less real it becomes. As it becomes less real, it recedes further into the distance of abstraction, futurity, unattainability. The -- Thomas Merton
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Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis. -- Thomas Merton
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Prayer is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him ... who loves us, who is near to us ... -- Thomas Merton
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The only unhappiness is not to love God. -- Thomas Merton
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Every breath we draw is a gift of God's love; every moment of existence is a grace. -- Thomas Merton
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The truly sacred attitude toward life is in no sense an escape from the sense of nothingness that assails us when we are left alone with ourselves. -- Thomas Merton
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We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others. -- Thomas Merton
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The biggest disease in North America is busyness. -- Thomas Merton
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Indeed, it is a kind of quintessence of pride to hate and fear even the kind and legitimate approval of those who love us! I mean, to resent it as a humiliating patronage. -- Thomas Merton
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God must be allowed the right to speak unpredictably ... We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend. We must find him in the pagan or we will lose him in our own selves, substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction. -- Thomas Merton
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The whole world has risen in Christ ... If God is 'all in all,' then everything is in fact paradise, because it is filled with the glory and presence of God, and nothing is any more separated from God. -- Thomas Merton
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It is not possible to be intimate with more than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common. -- Thomas Merton
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Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder. -- Thomas Merton
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We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us. -- Thomas Merton
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The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence - it is unshakeable -- Thomas Merton
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The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another. -- Thomas Merton
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I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place ... It is certainly part of my life of prayer. -- Thomas Merton
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It is not only our hatred of others that is dangerous but also and above all our hatred of ourselves: particularly that hatred of ourselves which is too deep and too powerful to be consciously faced. For it is this which makes us see our own evil in others and unable to see it in ourselves. -- Thomas Merton
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Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ. -- Thomas Merton
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True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques. -- Thomas Merton
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Love, in fact, is the spiritual life; and without it, all other exercises of the spirit are emptied of content. -- Thomas Merton
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A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live. -- Thomas Merton
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Business is not the supreme virtue, and sanctity is not measured by the amount of work we accomplish. Perfection is found in the purity of our love for God, and this pure love is a delicate plant that grows best where there is plenty of time for it to mature -- Thomas Merton
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Love not only prefers the good of another to my own, but it does not even compare the two. -- Thomas Merton
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Too much happiness, too much unhappiness, out of due time, men are thrown off balance. What will they do next? Thought runs wild. No control. They start everything, finish nothing. Here competition begins, here the idea of excellence is born, and robbers appear in the world. -- Thomas Merton
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We must suffer. Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason. It helps think clearly, judge sanely. It strengthens the action of our will. -- Thomas Merton
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There is only now. -- Thomas Merton
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Pride makes us artificial; humility makes us real -- Thomas Merton
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His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept. -- Thomas Merton
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Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves. -- Thomas Merton
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How free you can become if you stop worrying about things that don't concern you! -- Thomas Merton
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The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most. -- Thomas Merton
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For our duties and our needs, in all the fundamental things for which we were created, come down in practice to the same thing. -- Thomas Merton
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He is heard only when we hope to hear Him, and if, thinking our hope to be fulfilled, we cease to speak, His silence ceases to be vivid and becomes dead, even though we recharge it with the echo of our own emotional noise. -- Thomas Merton
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True happiness is found in unselfish Love, A love which increases in proportion as it is shared. -- Thomas Merton
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They knew a good building would praise God better than a bad one, even if the bad one were covered all over with official symbols of praise. -- Thomas Merton
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In all spiritualities there is a contrast between the affective or13 devotional (bhakti) and the intellectual, anoetic type of experience (raja yoga). -- Thomas Merton
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Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how. -- Thomas Merton
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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
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The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68 -- Thomas Merton
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But the one counsel he did give me is something that I will not easily forget: There are many beautiful mystical books written by the Christians. You should read St. Augustine's Confessions, and The Imitation of Christ -- Thomas Merton
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I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope ... there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk. -- Thomas Merton
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It seems to me that I have greater peace and am close to God when I am not "trying to be a contemplative," or trying to be anything special, but simply orienting my life fully and completely towards what seems to be required of a man like me at a time like this. -- Thomas Merton
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Before we can become who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person who we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger. -- Thomas Merton
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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. -- Thomas Merton
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Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity. -- Thomas Merton
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The goal of fasting is inner unity. -- Thomas Merton
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Infinite sharing is the law of God s inner life. -- Thomas Merton
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Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny ... To work out our identity in God. -- Thomas Merton
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He was a very good gardener, understood flowers, and knew how to make things grow. What is more, he liked this kind of work almost as much as painting. -- Thomas Merton
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Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess. -- Thomas Merton
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In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question. -- Thomas Merton
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We cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. -- Thomas Merton
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Our real journey in life is interior. -- Thomas Merton
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Love is free; it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love's sake. -- Thomas Merton
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The very first step to a correct understanding of the Christian theology of contemplation is to grasp clearly the unity of God and man in Christ, which of course presupposes the equally crucial unity of man in himself. -- Thomas Merton
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Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty. -- Thomas Merton
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There should be at least a room or some corner where no one will find you and disturb you or notice you. -- Thomas Merton
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We will to separate ourselves from that love. We reject it entirely and absolutely, and will not acknowledge it, simply because it does not please us to be loved. -- Thomas Merton
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Living is not thinking. Thought is formed and guided by objective reality outside us. Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new. -- Thomas Merton
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What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night. -- Thomas Merton
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For he who knows does not speak, He who speaks does not know" (12) And "The Wise Man gives instruction Without the use of speech." (13) -- Thomas Merton
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If we want to be spiritual, then, let us first of all live our lives. Let us not fear the responsibilities and the inevitable distractions of the work appointed for us by the will of God. -- Thomas Merton
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In the spiritual life there is no such thing as an indifference to love or hate. -- Thomas Merton
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Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason. -- Thomas Merton
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If lying and fabrication are psychologically harmful even in ordinary relations with other men (a sphere where a certain amount of falsification is not uncommon) all falsity is disastrous in any relation with the ground of our own being -- Thomas Merton
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The Mass is a memorial of Christ's sacrifice, not in the sense of an exterior commemoration, but as a living and supremely efficacious re-presentation of that sacrifice, pouring out into our hearts the redemptive power of the Cross and the grace of the resurrection, which enables us to live in God. -- Thomas Merton
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There are crimes that no one would commit as an individual which he willingly and bravely commits when acting in the name of his society, because he has been (too easily) convinced that evil is entirely different when it is done 'for the common good'. -- Thomas Merton
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Kind of prayer we here speak of as properly "monastic" (though it may also fit into the life of any lay person who is attracted to it) is a prayer of silence, simplicity, contemplative and meditative unity, a deep personal integration in an attentive, watchful listening of "the heart. -- Thomas Merton
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In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth. -- Thomas Merton
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When ambition ends, happiness begins. -- Thomas Merton
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Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity. -- Thomas Merton
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Neither of my parents suffered from the little spooky prejudices that devour the people who know nothing but automobiles and movies and what's in the ice-box and what's in the papers and which neighbors are getting a divorce. -- Thomas Merton
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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. -- Thomas Merton
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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
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I don't even need to know precisely what I am doing, except that I am acting for the love of God. -- Thomas Merton
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My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear. -- Thomas Merton
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This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under hope in the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly. -- Thomas Merton
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Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which ... are just the opposite of what we were made for? -- Thomas Merton
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We are warmed by the fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts. -- Thomas Merton
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If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world. -- Thomas Merton
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A Christian is committed to the belief that Love and Mercy are the most powerful forces on earth. -- Thomas Merton
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Christ is born to us today, in order that he may appear to the whole world through us. -- Thomas Merton
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This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and freedom of His grace, and who deny Him. -- Thomas Merton
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This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality, consists not in getting rid of the self but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first. -- Thomas Merton
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We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life! -- Thomas Merton
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Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. -- Thomas Merton
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LXXXI ABBOT PASTOR was asked by a certain brother: How should I conduct myself in the place where I live? The elder replied: Be as cautious as a stranger; wherever you may be, do not desire your word to have power before you, and you will have rest. -- Thomas Merton
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The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. -- Thomas Merton
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Contemplation is the awareness and realization, even in some sense experience, of what each Christian obscurely believes: "It is now no longer I that live but Christ lives in me." Hence -- Thomas Merton
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... He is most glorified by those in whom His mercy has produced the greatest love. -- Thomas Merton
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Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast. -- Thomas Merton
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He who is controlled by objects Loses possession of his inner self: If he no longer values himself, How can he value others? If he no longer values others, He is abandoned. He has nothing left! -- Thomas Merton
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Teach me to go to the country beyond words and beyond names. -- Thomas Merton
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Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38 -- Thomas Merton
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Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves. -- Thomas Merton
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When you see God in everyone, then they see God in you. -- Thomas Merton
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The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds -- Thomas Merton
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The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer -- Thomas Merton
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If we enter into ourselves, find our true self, and then pass beyond the inner "I", we sail forth into the immense darkness in which we confront the "I AM" of the Almighty. -- Thomas Merton
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IT is not we who choose to awaken ourselves, but God Who chooses to awaken us. -- Thomas Merton
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The fruitfulness of our lives depends in large measure in our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own work. The man who completely trusts his own estimate of himself is doomed to sterility. -- Thomas Merton
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I am happy that I can at least want to love God. Perhaps that is all I've got, but it is already all that is essential. And He will take care of the rest. -- Thomas Merton
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To become attached to the experience of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love. -- Thomas Merton
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The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive of perception. -- Thomas Merton
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Pardon all runners,
All speechless, alien winds,
All mad waters.
Pardon their impulses,
Their wild attitudes,
Their young flights, their reticence.
When a message has no clothes on
How can it be spoken. -- Thomas Merton
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When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. -- Thomas Merton
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His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decoration or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God's creation to bear witness for itself. -- Thomas Merton
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I will never be able to find myself if I isolate myself from the rest of mankind as if I were a different kind of being. -- Thomas Merton
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The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of Christian thought has seriously impaired this capacity, which nonviolence must recover. -- Thomas Merton
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To those who have no personal experience of this revolutionary aspect of Christian truth, but who see only the outer crust of dead, human conservatism that tends to form around the Church the way barnacles gather on the hull of a ship, all this talk about dynamism sounds foolish. -- Thomas Merton
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To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason. -- Thomas Merton
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A humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact, he is not afraid of anything, even himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God. -- Thomas Merton
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The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary every day routine. -- Thomas Merton
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Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us. -- Thomas Merton
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The man who lives in division is living in death. He cannot find himself because he is lost; he has ceased to be a reality. The person he believes himself to be is a bad dream. -- Thomas Merton
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The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe. -- Thomas Merton
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The tighter you squeeze, the less you have. -- Thomas Merton
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Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all others. -- Thomas Merton
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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
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While some men see ordinary happenings, others see divine light and guidance. -- Thomas Merton
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My mother was informing me, by mail, that she was about to die, and would never see me again. -- Thomas Merton
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How crazy it is to be "yourself" by trying to live up to an image of yourself you have unconsciously created in the minds of others. -- Thomas Merton
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The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God; and we seek Him successfully when we realize that we cannot find Him unless He shows Himself to us, and yet at the same time that He would not have inspired us to seek Him unless we had already found Him. -- Thomas Merton
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There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude. -- Thomas Merton
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God, Who is everywhere, never leaves us. Yet He seems sometimes to be present, sometimes to be absent. If we do not know Him well, we do not realize that He may be more present to us when He is absent than when He is present. -- Thomas Merton
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Stagnation and inactivity bring spiritual death. -- Thomas Merton
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The root of war is fear. -- Thomas Merton
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Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us. -- Thomas Merton
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The religious answer is not really religious if it's not fully real. Evasion is the answer of superstition. -- Thomas Merton
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Your eyes must turn, again and again, to the House that hides the Sacramental Christ! -- Thomas Merton
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It is my belief, that we should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in that part of humanity that is most remote from our own. -- Thomas Merton
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Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God. -- Thomas Merton
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The wisdom of the flesh is a judgement that the ordinary ends of our natural appetites are the goods to which the whole of man's life are to be ordered. Therefore it inevitably inclines the will to violate God's law. -- Thomas Merton
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Hence the sacred attitude is one which does not recoil from our own inner emptiness, but rather penetrates into it with awe and reverence, and with the awareness of mystery. -- Thomas Merton
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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
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What I do is live, how I pray is breathe, what I wear is pants. -- Thomas Merton
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THE MONASTERY IS A SCHOOL - A SCHOOL IN WHICH WE learn from God how to be happy. -- Thomas Merton
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We do not exist for ourselves. -- Thomas Merton
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The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived. -- Thomas Merton
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In Silence God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience. -- Thomas Merton
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We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it. -- Thomas Merton
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Perhaps I am stronger than I think. -- Thomas Merton
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What do you want to want to be, anyway?"
"I don't know; I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic."
"What you should say"
he told me
"what you should say is that you want to be a saint. -- Thomas Merton
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For although he is right with us and in and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find Him. -- Thomas Merton
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Humble people can do great things with uncommon perfection because they are no longer concerned about their own interests and their own reputation, and therefore they no longer need to waste their efforts in defending them. -- Thomas Merton
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We believe, not because we want to know, but because we want to be. -- Thomas Merton
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Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally. -- Thomas Merton
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Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked. -- Thomas Merton
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The humble person receives praise the way a clean window takes the light of the sun. The truer and more intense the light is, the less you see of the glass. -- Thomas Merton
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People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular- and too lazy to think of anything better. -- Thomas Merton
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The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily. -- Thomas Merton
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This implies that all truly serious and spiritual forms of religion aspire at least implicitly to a contemplative awakening both of the individual and of the group. -- Thomas Merton
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The fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the wind, and join in the general Dance. -- Thomas Merton
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Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are. -- Thomas Merton
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The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living. -- Thomas Merton
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There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all. -- Thomas Merton
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I need my heart to be moved by you. -- Thomas Merton
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The sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all. -- Thomas Merton
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We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation -- Thomas Merton
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The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around. -- Thomas Merton
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Because of their enmity you will be left alone. They will cast you out and forsake you. -- Thomas Merton
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No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers. -- Thomas Merton
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One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask. -- Thomas Merton
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We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man's reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole. -- Thomas Merton
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Humility is the surest sign of strength. -- Thomas Merton
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A daydream is an evasion. -- Thomas Merton
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The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay. -- Thomas Merton
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To be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy. -- Thomas Merton
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Duty does not have to be dull. Love can make it beautiful and fill it with life. -- Thomas Merton
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Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees. -- Thomas Merton
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This unity in love is one of the most characteristic works of the inner self, so that paradoxically the inner "I" is not only isolated but at the same time united with others on a higher plane, which is in fact the plane of spiritual solitude. -- Thomas Merton
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Love is perfect in proportion to it's freedom. -- Thomas Merton
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If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is "just glass." -- Thomas Merton
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The end of the world will be legal. -- Thomas Merton
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There is in all visible things - a hidden wholeness. -- Thomas Merton
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We do not pray for the sake of praying, but for the sake of being heard. We do not pray in order to listen to ourselves praying but in order that God may hear us and answer us. Also, we do not pray in order to receive just any answer: it must be God's answer. -- Thomas Merton
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It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives. -- Thomas Merton
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The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him. -- Thomas Merton
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The thing that made Communism seem so plausible to me was my own lack of logic which failed to distinguish between the reality of the evils which Communism was trying to overcome and the validity of its diagnosis and the chosen cure. -- Thomas Merton
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We are united to Him in darkness, because we have to hope. -- Thomas Merton
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The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith. -- Thomas Merton
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The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear. -- Thomas Merton
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In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything. -- Thomas Merton
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To be truly Catholic is not merely to be correct according to an abstractly universal standard of truth, but also and above all to be able to enter into the problems and the joys of all, to understand all, to be all things to all. -- Thomas Merton
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Those who think they 'know' from the beginning will never in fact
come to know anything. -- Thomas Merton
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I shall lead you through the loneliness, the solitude you will not understand; but it is my shortcut to your soul. -- Thomas Merton
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The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. -- Thomas Merton
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What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe. -- Thomas Merton
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A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book. -- Thomas Merton
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The God of peace is never glorified by human violence. -- Thomas Merton
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The least of learning is done in the classrooms. -- Thomas Merton
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There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible... -- Thomas Merton
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A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass -- Thomas Merton
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Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered ... -- Thomas Merton
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If you have love you will do all things well. -- Thomas Merton
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Ask me not where I live or what I like to eat ... Ask me what I am living for and what I think is keeping me from living fully that. -- Thomas Merton
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It is lawful to love all things and to seek them, once they become means to the love of God. There is nothing we cannot ask of Him if we desire it in order that He may be more loved by ourselves or by other men. -- Thomas Merton
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This time is given to me by God that I may live in it. It is not given to make something out of it, but given me to be stored away in eternity as my own. -- Thomas Merton
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Father," I answered, "I want to give God everything. -- Thomas Merton
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To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions. -- Thomas Merton
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For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness -- Thomas Merton
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Actually I feel more sure than I ever have in my life that I am obeying the Lord and am on the way He wills for me, though at the same time I am struck and appalled (more than ever!) by the shoddiness of my response. -- Thomas Merton
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To be unknown to God is entirely too much privacy. -- Thomas Merton
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I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me. -- Thomas Merton
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I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God. -- Thomas Merton
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I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself. If modern people were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of their absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be the possibility of their survival. -- Thomas Merton
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To see how seriously men take things and yet how little their seriousness profits them. Their tragedy makes our mediocrity all the more terrible. -- Thomas Merton
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They were in the world and not of it
not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it. -- Thomas Merton
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O God, my God, the night has values that the day never dreamed of. -- Thomas Merton
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For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air. -- Thomas Merton
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They went into the desert not to study speculative truth, but to wrestle with practical evil; not to perfect their analytical intelligence, but to purify their hearts. -- Thomas Merton
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Our sorry idiot life, our idiot existence, idiot not because it has to be but because it is not what it could be with a little more courage and care. -- Thomas Merton
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The gate of heaven is everywhere. -- Thomas Merton
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But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact pleases You. -- Thomas Merton
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In the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong. -- Thomas Merton
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Love is the door to eternity. -- Thomas Merton
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To place your trust in visible things is to live in despair. -- Thomas Merton
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To worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell. -- Thomas Merton
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Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. -- Thomas Merton
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Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within. -- Thomas Merton
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Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest, -- Thomas Merton
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It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not what he ought to be. If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we do away with him altogether. -- Thomas Merton
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Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more. -- Thomas Merton