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It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.

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
Lives
Mindfulness
True
Immediate
Better
Task
Firsts
Intention
First
Tasks
World
Creating
Create
Called
Exalted

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination.
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For power can guarantee the interests of some men but it can never foster the good of man. Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all the others. Only love can attain and preserve the good of all. Any claim to build the security of all on force is a manifest imposture.
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You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
Thomas Merton
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If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.
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
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Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am.
Thomas Merton
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The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
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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How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city?
Thomas Merton
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Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.
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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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
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Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself.
Thomas Merton
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But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.
Thomas Merton
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There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude.
Thomas Merton
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A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
Thomas Merton
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A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair.
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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To be alone by being part of the universe-fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without.
Thomas Merton
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I am beginning to realize that sanity is no longer a value or an end in itself. The sanity of modern man is about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of his surviv
Thomas Merton