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

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I was not sure where I was going, and I could not see what I would do when I got [there]. But you saw further and clearer than I, and you opened the seas before my ship, whose track led me across the waters to a place I had never dreamed of, and which you were even then preparing to be my rescue and my shelter and my home.
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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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The simplicity that all this presupposes is not easy to attain. I find that my life constantly threatens to become complex and divisive. A life of prayer is basically a very simple life. This simplicity, however, is the result of asceticism and effort: it is not a spontaneous simplicity.
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Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.
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The whole world has risen in Christ... If God is 'all in all,' then everything is in fact paradise, because it is filled with the glory and presence of God, and nothing is any more separated from God.
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Humility is the surest sign of strength.
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And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.
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The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.
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Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am.
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Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.
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For although God is right with us and in us and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find him.
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It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes.
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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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That is God's call to us - simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.
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Whose silence are you?
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Our real journey in life is interior.
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To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions.
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Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.
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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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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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