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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

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
Mass
Emotional
Greatest
Clutter
Wisdom
Rubbish
Need
Enormous
Needs
Mental
Mind
Minds
Time
Clean

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of him. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But if I am true to the concept that God utters in me, if I am true to the thought of Him that I was meant to embody, I shall be full of his actuality and find him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere.
Thomas Merton
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It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not what he ought to be. If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we do away with him altogether.
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Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.
Thomas Merton
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Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.
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Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.
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A humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact, he is not afraid of anything, even himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God.
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He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.
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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.
Thomas Merton
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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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Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest.
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What do you want to want to be, anyway? I don't know I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic. What you should say--he told me--what you should say is that you want to be a saint.
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What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?
Thomas Merton
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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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Today will never come again.
Thomas Merton
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Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.
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The meaning of life is found in openness to being and being present in full awareness.
Thomas Merton
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Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a savior.
Thomas Merton
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There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude.
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The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.
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Meditation is one of the ways in which the spiritual man keeps himself awake.
Thomas Merton