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Violence is essentially wordless. and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.

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
Violence
Thought
Wordless
Essentially
Rational
Communication
Begin
Broken

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Meditation is one of the ways in which the spiritual man keeps himself awake.
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What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?
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You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
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The pleasure of a good act is something to be remembered - not in order to feed our complacency but in order to remind us that virtuous actions are not only possible and valuable, but that they can become easier and more delightful and more fruitful than the acts of vice which oppose and frustrate them.
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Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.
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Love is its own reward.
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The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.
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In the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong.
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Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.
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We are not converted only once in our lives but many times and this endless series of conversions and inner revolutions leads to our transformation.
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I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.
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The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to him.
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There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.
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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.
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Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
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To be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.
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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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Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am.
Thomas Merton
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He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.
Thomas Merton
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The only unhappiness is not to love God.
Thomas Merton