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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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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
Listening
Courage
Attentive
Remaining
Quietly
Presence
Requires
Quiet

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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The only unhappiness is not to love God.
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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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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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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Meditation is one of the ways in which the spiritual man keeps himself awake.
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 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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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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And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.
Thomas Merton
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To be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.
Thomas Merton
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Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.
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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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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Our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. Without wisdom, the apparent opposition of action and contemplation, of work and rest, of involvement and detachment, can never be resolved.
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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Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.
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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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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... but any fool knows that you don't need money to get enjoyment out of life.
Thomas Merton
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The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.
Thomas Merton