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A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.
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
Stops
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Wisdom
Found
Live
Men
Thinking
Vocation
Life
More quotes by Thomas Merton
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
We must suffer. Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason. It helps think clearly, judge sanely. It strengthens the action of our will.
Thomas Merton
The meaning of life is found in openness to being and being present in full awareness.
Thomas Merton
To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions.
Thomas Merton
Our real journey in life is interior.
Thomas Merton
A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
Thomas Merton
The goal of fasting is inner unity.
Thomas Merton
The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself.
Thomas Merton
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.
Thomas Merton
To be risen with Christ means not only that one has a choice and that one may live by a higher law - the law of grace and love - but that one must do so. The first obligation of the Christian is to maintain their freedom from all superstitions, all blind taboos and religious formalities, indeed from all empty forms of legalism.
Thomas Merton
We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation
Thomas Merton
Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
Thomas Merton
While some men see ordinary happenings, others see divine light and guidance.
Thomas Merton
One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife.
Thomas Merton
Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are.
Thomas Merton
Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.
Thomas Merton
The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.
Thomas Merton
The married man and the mother of a Christian family, if they are faithful to their obligations, will fulfill a mission that is as great as it is consoling: that of bringing into the world and forming young souls capable of happiness and love, souls capable of sanctification and transformation in Christ.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out.
Thomas Merton
