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The grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.

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
Good
Gratitude
Grateful
Difference
Differences
Experience
Makes
Persons
Unresponsive
Person
Hearsay

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A daydream is an evasion.
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There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
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The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.
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Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest.
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Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.
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We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others.
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Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
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If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology. For religion goes beyond words and actions, and attains to the ultimate Truth only in silence and Love.
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Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself.
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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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Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.
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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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People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
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For although God is right with us and in us and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find him.
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Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another.
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The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist....It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door.
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Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally.
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If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.
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If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.
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Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.
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