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Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost
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
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More quotes by Thomas Merton
There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.
Thomas Merton
Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.
Thomas Merton
A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.
Thomas Merton
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
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.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
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.
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
We do not exist for ourselves.
Thomas Merton
Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.
Thomas Merton
I am earth, earth My heart's love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected
Thomas Merton
We love the things we pretend to laugh at.
Thomas Merton
To become attached to the experience of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love.
Thomas Merton
The only unhappiness is not to love God.
Thomas Merton
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
God must be allowed the right to speak unpredictably.... We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend. We must find him in the pagan or we will lose him in our own selves, substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction.
Thomas Merton
Our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. Without wisdom, the apparent opposition of action and contemplation, of work and rest, of involvement and detachment, can never be resolved.
Thomas Merton
For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another. If my heart does not first belong to me, how can I give it to another?
Thomas Merton
Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast.
Thomas Merton
The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude.
Thomas Merton
