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In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.

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
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Personal
Wisdom
Reality
Ends
Everything

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.
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The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.
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People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.
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And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.
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Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.
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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.
Thomas Merton
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I shall lead you through the loneliness, the solitude you will not understand but it is my shortcut to your soul.
Thomas Merton
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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
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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
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God, Who is everywhere, never leaves us. Yet He seems sometimes to be present, sometimes to be absent. If we do not know Him well, we do not realize that He may be more present to us when He is absent than when He is present.
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Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation.
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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We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation
Thomas Merton
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You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer.
Thomas Merton
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The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thomas Merton
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Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.
Thomas Merton
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Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38
Thomas Merton
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The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.
Thomas Merton
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Humble people can do great things with uncommon perfection because they are no longer concerned about their own interests and their own reputation, and therefore they no longer need to waste their efforts in defending them.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton