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Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.

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
Errors
Greenhouse
Kept
Poisonous
Tree
Planted
Become
Giant
Wells
Grain
Well
Giants
Innocently
Error
Grains
Trees
Greenhouses

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!
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The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself.
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To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions.
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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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There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.
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To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, and no man is saved by his own sufferings. To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ more, it is to know the love of Christ Who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ.
Thomas Merton
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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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In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
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One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife.
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The gift of love is the gift of the power and capacity to love, and therefore, to give love with full effect is also to receive it. So love can only be kept by being given away, and it can only be given perfectly when it is also received.
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....it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.
Thomas Merton
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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.
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Every breath we draw is a gift of God's love every moment of existence is a grace.
Thomas Merton
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I was not sure where I was going, and I could not see what I would do when I got [there]. But you saw further and clearer than I, and you opened the seas before my ship, whose track led me across the waters to a place I had never dreamed of, and which you were even then preparing to be my rescue and my shelter and my home.
Thomas Merton
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It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes.
Thomas Merton
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Love is perfect in proportion to it's freedom.
Thomas Merton
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One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us.
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Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good.
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The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.
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Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
Thomas Merton