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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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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
Never
Beginners
Life
Convinced
Prayer
Wisdom
Fact
Facts
Else
Anything

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Saints are what they are not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everyone else.
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Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God.
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A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass
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The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will.
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The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.
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O God, my God, the night has values that the day never dreamed of.
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a man can radically change his life and attain to a deeper meaning, a more perfect integration, a more complete fulfillment, a more total liberty of spirit than are possible in the routines of a purely active existence centered on money-making.
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The problem today is that there are no deserts, only dude ranches.
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The biggest disease in North America is busyness.
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Love is the door to eternity.
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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.
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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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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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For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air.
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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.
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A gentle sense of humor will be alert to detect anything that savors of a pious 'act' on the part of the penitent.
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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.
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Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice.
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But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.
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I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may meanI myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both.
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