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And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.

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
Beyond
Wordless
Levels
Communion
Wisdom
Deepest
Words
Concept
Concepts
Communication
Speech
Level

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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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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We love the things we pretend to laugh at.
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I shall lead you through the loneliness, the solitude you will not understand but it is my shortcut to your soul.
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Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast.
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The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order.
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Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.
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The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.
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Love is an intensification of life.
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Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.
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God must be allowed the right to speak unpredictably.... We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend. We must find him in the pagan or we will lose him in our own selves, substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction.
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Love is free it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love's sake.
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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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The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68
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Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good.
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Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered.
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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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We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.
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The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe.
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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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Those who think they 'know' from the beginning will never in fact come to know anything.
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