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
Darkness
Spiritual
Fall
Stumble
True
Enlightened
Even
Fallen
Constantly
Failure

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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.
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Love is the door to eternity.
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Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything.
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Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.
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The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.
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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.
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Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
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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.
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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.
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If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.
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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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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.
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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
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We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to like one another.
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And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.
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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.
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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.
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Love is perfect in proportion to it's freedom.
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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.
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There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
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