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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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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
Darkness
Spiritual
Fall
True
Stumble
Even
Enlightened
Fallen
Constantly
Failure
More quotes by Thomas Merton
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.
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... but any fool knows that you don't need money to get enjoyment out of life.
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Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
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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.
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That is God's call to us - simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.
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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.
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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.
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Christ is born to us today, in order that he may appear to the whole world through us.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Love is an intensification of life.
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He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.
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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.
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We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of God in this life, and that is why we are travelling and in darkness. But we already possess Him by grace, and therefore in that sense we have arrived and are dwelling in the light. But oh! How far have I to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived!
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Love is the door to eternity.
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There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.
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Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.
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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.
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