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Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.

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
Prayer
Wisdom
Hours
Stone
Turns
Stones
Heart
Hour
Really
Becomes
Love
Learned
Impossible

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In an age where there is much talk about being yourself, I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else.
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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
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Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.
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Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.
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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.
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... but any fool knows that you don't need money to get enjoyment out of life.
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When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago.
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We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of God in this life, and that is why we are travelling and in darkness. But we already possess Him by grace, and therefore in that sense we have arrived and are dwelling in the light. But oh! How far have I to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived!
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The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.
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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 peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable
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Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.
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In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.
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We are not converted only once in our lives but many times and this endless series of conversions and inner revolutions leads to our transformation.
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Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything.
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The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist....It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door.
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Love is its own reward.
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In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.
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If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him.
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Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.
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