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Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk's life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.
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
Life
Living
Monastic
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Monk
Cannot
Ideals
Anything
Rate
Ideas
Begin
Important
Unless
Trying
Happiness
Thinking
Idea
More quotes by Thomas Merton
Love is free it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love's sake.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
Every man becomes the image of the God he adores. He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead. He who loves corruption rots. He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing.
Thomas Merton
Stop asking yourself questions that have no meaning. Or if they have, you'll find out when you need to -- find out both the questions and the answers.
Thomas Merton
Faith is the door to the full inner life of the Church, a life which includes not only access to an authoritative teaching but above all to a deep personal experience which is at once unique and yet shared by the whole Body of Christ, in the Spirit of Christ.
Thomas Merton
I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
....it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.
Thomas Merton
Whose silence are you?
Thomas Merton
Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.
Thomas Merton
The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the other.... The whole purpose of life is to live by love.
Thomas Merton
Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
Thomas Merton
Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.
Thomas Merton
A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass
Thomas Merton
The end of the world will be legal.
Thomas Merton
The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to him.
Thomas Merton
And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.
Thomas Merton
Saints are what they are not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everyone else.
Thomas Merton
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
May God prevent us from becoming right-thinking men-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.
Thomas Merton