Quote

The things I thought were so important -- because of the effort I put into them -- have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.

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
Effort
Small
Values
Mattered
Thought
Measure
Able
Turned
Important
Expect
Things
Value
Never
Either

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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The grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.
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The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.
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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.
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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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There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
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How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived.
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We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to like one another.
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We are already ONE. We just think we are separate.
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To be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.
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Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it.
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The camera does not know what it takes it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.
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There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.
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The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order.
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I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God.
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We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it.
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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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We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.
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A faith that is afraid of other people is no faith at all.
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Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.
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When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.
Thomas Merton