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Humble people can do great things with uncommon perfection because they are no longer concerned about their own interests and their own reputation, and therefore they no longer need to waste their efforts in defending them.

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
People
Concerned
Efforts
Longer
Reputation
Effort
Interests
Interest
Humble
Need
Humility
Great
Perfection
Needs
Waste
Uncommon
Things
Therefore
Defending

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
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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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One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife.
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We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it.
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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
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Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a savior.
Thomas Merton
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Each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it by His Love and His infinite Art.
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.
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We must suffer. Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason. It helps think clearly, judge sanely. It strengthens the action of our will.
Thomas Merton
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God, have mercy on me in the blindness in which I hope I am seeking You!
Thomas Merton
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Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.
Thomas Merton
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The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.
Thomas Merton
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May God prevent us from becoming right-thinking men-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thomas Merton
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How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city?
Thomas Merton
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People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.
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Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
Thomas Merton
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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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Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.
Thomas Merton