Quote

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
Spiritual
Fall
True
Stumble
Even
Enlightened
Fallen
Constantly
Failure
Darkness

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The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to him.
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A faith that is afraid of other people is no faith at all.
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My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear.
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It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes.
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May God prevent us from becoming right-thinking men-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
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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.
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Every breath we draw is a gift of God's love every moment of existence is a grace.
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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
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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.
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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.
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How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city?
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