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Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.
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
Nothing
Unresponsive
Never
Hearsay
Awakening
Granted
Constantly
Gratitude
Takes
Wonder
More quotes by Thomas Merton
The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.
Thomas Merton
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
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.
Thomas Merton
The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of Christian thought has seriously impaired this capacity, which nonviolence must recover.
Thomas Merton
It is the will of God that we live not only as rational beings, but as new men regenerated by the Holy Spirit in Christ. It is His will that we reach out for our inheritance, that we answer His call to be His sons. We are born men without our consent, but the consent to be sons of God has to be elicited by our own free will.
Thomas Merton
This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality, consists not in getting rid of the self but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first.
Thomas Merton
The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
Thomas Merton
To be risen with Christ means not only that one has a choice and that one may live by a higher law - the law of grace and love - but that one must do so. The first obligation of the Christian is to maintain their freedom from all superstitions, all blind taboos and religious formalities, indeed from all empty forms of legalism.
Thomas Merton
May we all grow in grace and peace and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us.
Thomas Merton
To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, and no man is saved by his own sufferings. To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ more, it is to know the love of Christ Who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ.
Thomas Merton
I shall lead you through the loneliness, the solitude you will not understand but it is my shortcut to your soul.
Thomas Merton
Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast.
Thomas Merton
The only unhappiness is not to love God.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.
Thomas Merton
My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear.
Thomas Merton
May God prevent us from becoming right-thinking men-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.
Thomas Merton
There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.
Thomas Merton
Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.
Thomas Merton
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
