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Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.

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
Things
Interdependence
Keen
Awareness
Compassion

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The things I thought were so important -- because of the effort I put into them -- have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.
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You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer.
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While some men see ordinary happenings, others see divine light and guidance.
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His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept.
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Infinite sharing is the law of God s inner life.
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Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found.
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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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Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.
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To become attached to the experience of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love.
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Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action.
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The gift of love is the gift of the power and capacity to love, and therefore, to give love with full effect is also to receive it. So love can only be kept by being given away, and it can only be given perfectly when it is also received.
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The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable
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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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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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If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is just glass.
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Business is not the supreme virtue, and sanctity is not measured by the amount of work we accomplish. Perfection is found in the purity of our love for God, and this pure love is a delicate plant that grows best where there is plenty of time for it to mature
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We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to like one another.
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A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions, is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of choice when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses.
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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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The biggest disease in North America is busyness.
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