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The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.

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
Spirituality
Modern
Society
Spiritual
Degradation
Sense
Symbol
Many
Signs
Decay
Symbols

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Every breath we draw is a gift of God's love every moment of existence is a grace.
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The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will.
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Love is its own reward.
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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.
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Love is an intensification of life.
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Today will never come again.
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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.
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This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.
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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.
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The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds
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The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude.
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Every man becomes the image of the God he adores. He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead. He who loves corruption rots. He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing.
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There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
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Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice.
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The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
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When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago.
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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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In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.
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How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city?
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A daydream is an evasion.
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