Quote

The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.

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
Evil
Goods
Great
Temptation
Offer
Obvious
Masking
Offers
Solicit
Sin
Temptations
Greatest
Evils
Wisdom
Consent

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Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.
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Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
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Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it.
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One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us.
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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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The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!
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If we examine ourselves carefully we shall see most of us have an enormous amount of unfinished business...We have to be free so that we can just step across the line and that's it. That is what real freedom is.
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Love is our true destiny.
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We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.
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The goal of fasting is inner unity.
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One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife.
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Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.
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Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.
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Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything.
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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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Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.
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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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And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.
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Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.
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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?
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