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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
Wisdom
Fact
Facts
Else
Anything
Never
Beginners
Life
Convinced
Prayer

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When ambition ends, happiness begins.
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We love the things we pretend to laugh at.
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The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.
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When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.
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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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O God, my God, the night has values that the day never dreamed of.
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Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.
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We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it.
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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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What do you want to want to be, anyway? I don't know I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic. What you should say--he told me--what you should say is that you want to be a saint.
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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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Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.
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No matter how ruined man and his world may seem to be, and no matter how terrible man's despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning.
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I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me.
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You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
Thomas Merton
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To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything.
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Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest.
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Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself.
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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!
Thomas Merton
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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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