Quote

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect on me is to live on the doorstep of hell. Selfishness is doomed to frustration centered as it is upon a lie. To live exclusively for myself, I must make all things bend themselves to my will as if I were a god.

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
Upon
Situations
Spiritual
Effect
Doorstep
Light
Consider
Exclusively
Persons
Effects
Bend
Live
Events
Centered
Must
Hell
Doomed
Make
Situation
Selfishness
Things
Lying
Frustration

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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Christ is born to us today, in order that he may appear to the whole world through us.
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Are they moved by a sense of human need for silence, for reflection, for inner seeking? So they want to get away from the noise and tension of modern life, at least for a little while, in order to relax their minds and wills and seek a blessed healing sense of inner unity, reconciliation, integration?
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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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Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
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There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.
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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 whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
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What do you want to want to be, anyway? I don't know I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic. What you should say--he told me--what you should say is that you want to be a saint.
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We love the things we pretend to laugh at.
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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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If we examine ourselves carefully we shall see most of us have an enormous amount of unfinished business...We have to be free so that we can just step across the line and that's it. That is what real freedom is.
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Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.
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Infinite sharing is the law of God s inner life.
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a man can radically change his life and attain to a deeper meaning, a more perfect integration, a more complete fulfillment, a more total liberty of spirit than are possible in the routines of a purely active existence centered on money-making.
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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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When ambition ends, happiness begins.
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Cupidity...takes created things for ends in themselves, which they are not. The will that seeks rest in creatures for their own sake stops on the way to its true end, terminates in a value which does not exist, and thus frustrates all its deepest capacities for happiness and peace.
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October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.
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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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To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything.
Thomas Merton