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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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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
Humans
Opinion
Well
Wisdom
Called
Devils
Light
Saints
Earth
Saint
May
Devil
Wells
Darkness
Human
Ones

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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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The camera does not know what it takes it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.
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We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to like one another.
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Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.
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I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God.
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Love is its own reward.
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The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds
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The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable
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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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What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?
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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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Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest.
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The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God and we seek Him successfully when we realize that we cannot find Him unless He shows Himself to us, and yet at the same time that He would not have inspired us to seek Him unless we had already found Him.
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There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.
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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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Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.
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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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The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude.
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We do not exist for ourselves.
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If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.
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