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The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68

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
Price
Destruction
Paid
Cause
Becomes
Liberty
Quoted
Causes
Wholesale
Enjoy
Mockery

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The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself.
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Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.
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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 pleasure of a good act is something to be remembered - not in order to feed our complacency but in order to remind us that virtuous actions are not only possible and valuable, but that they can become easier and more delightful and more fruitful than the acts of vice which oppose and frustrate them.
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Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love.
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How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city?
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True encounter with Christ liberates something in us, a power we did not know we had, a hope, a capacity for life, a resilience, an ability to bounce back when we thought we were completely defeated, a capacity to grow and change, a power of creative transformation.
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My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear.
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Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
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None of our prayers should ever be petitions for our own needs: for this is only another subtle way of trying to put ourselves on the same plane as God — acting as if we had no needs, as if we were not creatures, not dependent on Him.
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Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.
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Curiously, the most serious religious people, or the most concerned scholars, those who constantly read the Bible as a matter of professional or pious duty, can often manage to evade a radically involved dialogue with the book they are questioning.
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To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything.
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Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.
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The least of the work of learning is done in classrooms.
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As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination.
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If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.
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I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God.
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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.
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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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