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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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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
Moment
Recognize
Hope
Embrace
Moments
Exactly
Need
Possibility
Offered
Needs
Courage
Precisely
Heart
Present
Possibilities
Going
Challenges
Happenings
Faith
Happening

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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Ultimately faith is the only key to the universe. The final meaning of human existence, and the answers to the questions on which all our happiness depends cannot be found in any other way.
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Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
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Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are.
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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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If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology. For religion goes beyond words and actions, and attains to the ultimate Truth only in silence and Love.
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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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And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.
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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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Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.
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I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.
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Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.
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How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived.
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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
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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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Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
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The camera does not know what it takes it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.
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I am beginning to realize that sanity is no longer a value or an end in itself. The sanity of modern man is about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of his surviv
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Since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to be affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs.
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The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love, and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.
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The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.
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