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The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.

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
Contradiction
Mercy
Ways
Way
Life
Contradictions
Signs

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.
Thomas Merton
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When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat when we see children in a moment when they are really children.
Thomas Merton
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And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice.
Thomas Merton
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For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness
Thomas Merton
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Those who think they 'know' from the beginning will never in fact come to know anything.
Thomas Merton
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The meaning of life is found in openness to being and being present in full awareness.
Thomas Merton
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Faith is the door to the full inner life of the Church, a life which includes not only access to an authoritative teaching but above all to a deep personal experience which is at once unique and yet shared by the whole Body of Christ, in the Spirit of Christ.
Thomas Merton
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The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done
Thomas Merton
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The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.
Thomas Merton
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Every man becomes the image of the God he adores. He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead. He who loves corruption rots. He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing.
Thomas Merton
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We thank Him less by words than by the serene happiness of silent acceptance. It is our emptiness in the presence of His reality, our silence in the presence of His infinitely rich silence, our joy in the bosom of the serene darkness in which His light holds us absorbed, it is all this that praises Him.
Thomas Merton
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Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.
Thomas Merton
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Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.
Thomas Merton
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They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.
Thomas Merton
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When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.
Thomas Merton
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A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair.
Thomas Merton
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The grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.
Thomas Merton
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Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.
Thomas Merton