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Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love.

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
Truth
Love
Perfected
Thanksgiving
Thankful
Rejoice
Knowledge
Experience

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything.
Thomas Merton
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Humility is the surest sign of strength.
Thomas Merton
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To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.
Thomas Merton
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To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything.
Thomas Merton
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Ultimately faith is the only key to the universe. The final meaning of human existence, and the answers to the questions on which all our happiness depends cannot be found in any other way.
Thomas Merton
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The meaning of life is found in openness to being and being present in full awareness.
Thomas Merton
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Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.
Thomas Merton
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For power can guarantee the interests of some men but it can never foster the good of man. Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all the others. Only love can attain and preserve the good of all. Any claim to build the security of all on force is a manifest imposture.
Thomas Merton
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When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.
Thomas Merton
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The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.
Thomas Merton
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We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to like one another.
Thomas Merton
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The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
Thomas Merton
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To be truly Catholic is not merely to be correct according to an abstractly universal standard of truth, but also and above all to be able to enter into the problems and the joys of all, to understand all, to be all things to all.
Thomas Merton
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Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest.
Thomas Merton
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The camera does not know what it takes it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.
Thomas Merton
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The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love, and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.
Thomas Merton
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The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of Christian thought has seriously impaired this capacity, which nonviolence must recover.
Thomas Merton