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

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Imagination has the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new.
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O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't.
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The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.
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The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth.
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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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From the moment you put a piece of bread in your mouth you are part of the world. Who grew the wheat? Who made the bread? Where did it come from? You are in relationship with all who brought it to the table. We are least separate and most in common when we eat and drink.
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May God prevent us from becoming right-thinking men-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.
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It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as Gods will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe youtry to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as Gods will yourself!
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The things I thought were so important -- because of the effort I put into them -- have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.
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Those who think they 'know' from the beginning will never in fact come to know anything.
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The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer
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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
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By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
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Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.
Thomas Merton
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The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude.
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If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is just glass.
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A daydream is an evasion.
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Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.
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Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
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God, have mercy on me in the blindness in which I hope I am seeking You!
Thomas Merton