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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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Thomas Merton
Age: 53 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 15
Died: 1968
Died: December 10
Autobiographer
Catholic Priest
Essayist
Journalist
Peace Activist
Poet
Theologian
Trappist Cistercian Monk
Writer
Thomas Feverel Merton
Father Louis
Effects
Loved
Care
Secondary
Take
Seeks
Thing
Reward
Good
Leaves
Love
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Therefore

More quotes by 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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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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Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. 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. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action.
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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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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If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.
Thomas Merton
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The goal of fasting is inner unity.
Thomas Merton
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The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the other.... The whole purpose of life is to live by love.
Thomas Merton
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Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.
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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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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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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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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We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to like one another.
Thomas Merton
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The end of the world will be legal.
Thomas Merton
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To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.
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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Today will never come again.
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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Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.
Thomas Merton