Quote

The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.

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
Acting
Pilgrimage
Best
Meanings
Without
Symbolic
Outer
Signs
Inner
Journey
Wisdom
Geographical

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.
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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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You are made in the image of what you desire.
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Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
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It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.
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No matter how ruined man and his world may seem to be, and no matter how terrible man's despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning.
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I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.
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Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.
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How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived.
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To Serve the God of Love one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to love in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one's neighbor.
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Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest.
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The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God and we seek Him successfully when we realize that we cannot find Him unless He shows Himself to us, and yet at the same time that He would not have inspired us to seek Him unless we had already found Him.
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Since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to be affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs.
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Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.
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We are already ONE. We just think we are separate.
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Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.
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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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Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.
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Today will never come again.
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Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
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