Quote

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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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
Self
Inspiration
Pagan
Right
Loses
Selves
Must
Enemy
Abstraction
Even
Faith
Allowed
Living
Presence
Speak
Empty
May
Friend
Find
Lose
Substituting

More quotes by 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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None of our prayers should ever be petitions for our own needs: for this is only another subtle way of trying to put ourselves on the same plane as God — acting as if we had no needs, as if we were not creatures, not dependent on Him.
Thomas Merton
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Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.
Thomas Merton
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The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude.
Thomas Merton
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Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.
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 become attached to the experience of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love.
Thomas Merton
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The end of the world will be legal.
Thomas Merton
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Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence.
Thomas Merton
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Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything.
Thomas Merton
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While some men see ordinary happenings, others see divine light and guidance.
Thomas Merton
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The goal of fasting is inner unity.
Thomas Merton
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People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.
Thomas Merton
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It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as Gods will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe youtry to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as Gods will yourself!
Thomas Merton
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In an age where there is much talk about being yourself, I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else.
Thomas Merton
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Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.
Thomas Merton
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Love is...like a spring coming up out of the ground of our own depths. I am gift. All that I am is something that's given, and given freely. Being doesn't cost anything. There's no price tag, no strings attached.
Thomas Merton
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The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe.
Thomas Merton
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To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.
Thomas Merton
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Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.
Thomas Merton