Quote

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

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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
Stand
Valleys
Place
Lakes
Flowers
Hay
Earth
Field
Bursts
Heart
Blue
Appointed
Love
Air
Lake
Flower
Reflected
Fields
Valley

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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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.
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The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds
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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
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This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality, consists not in getting rid of the self but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first.
Thomas Merton
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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
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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
Thomas Merton
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God, have mercy on me in the blindness in which I hope I am seeking You!
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The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order.
Thomas Merton
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His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept.
Thomas Merton
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Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything.
Thomas Merton
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Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered.
Thomas Merton
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I shall lead you through the loneliness, the solitude you will not understand but it is my shortcut to your soul.
Thomas Merton
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The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude.
Thomas Merton
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Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.
Thomas Merton
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We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human and visible means, nor rests in any visible end. He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.
Thomas Merton
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If you have love you will do all things well.
Thomas Merton
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When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat when we see children in a moment when they are really children.
Thomas Merton
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Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.
Thomas Merton
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Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good.
Thomas Merton
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We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to like one another.
Thomas Merton