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I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and happening, and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it.

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
Moment
Happenings
Sense
Glad
Makes
Happening
Moments
Recognize
Without
Silence
Full
Metaphysical
Knowing
Paradise
Space
Suppose

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.
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I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me.
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Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.
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We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!
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It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.
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That is God's call to us - simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything.
Thomas Merton
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But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.
Thomas Merton
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In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.
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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.
Thomas Merton
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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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The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a man's life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul.
Thomas Merton
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The goal of fasting is inner unity.
Thomas Merton
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To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair.
Thomas Merton
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The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the other.... The whole purpose of life is to live by love.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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To be alone by being part of the universe-fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to.
Thomas Merton