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....it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.

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
Meaning
Wisdom
Face
Suffering
Faces
Robbed
Jesus
Resurrection
Death
Essence
Good
Christianity

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There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude.
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Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.
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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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To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.
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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.
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We do not exist for ourselves.
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The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable
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For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another. If my heart does not first belong to me, how can I give it to another?
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I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.
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And of course most non-Catholics imagine that the Church is immensely rich, and that all Catholic institutions make money hand over fist, and that all the money is stored away somewhere to buy gold and silver dishes for the Pope and cigars for the College of Cardinals.
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When ambition ends, happiness begins.
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The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.
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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.
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In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.
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Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.
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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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The goal of fasting is inner unity.
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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 whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
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Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between 'things' and 'God' as if God were another thing and as if creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God.
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