Quote

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.

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
Reality
Elements
Around
Ordinary
Come
Beginning
Important
Value
Splendour
Things
Alive
Interior
Life
Beauty
Interiors
Ability
Neglected
Values
Respond

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God.
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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.
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The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the other.... The whole purpose of life is to live by love.
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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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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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The pleasure of a good act is something to be remembered - not in order to feed our complacency but in order to remind us that virtuous actions are not only possible and valuable, but that they can become easier and more delightful and more fruitful than the acts of vice which oppose and frustrate them.
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A gentle sense of humor will be alert to detect anything that savors of a pious 'act' on the part of the penitent.
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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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Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.
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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.
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Love is its own reward.
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His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept.
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The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.
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The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love, and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.
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Our real journey in life is interior.
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Either you look at the universe as a very poor creation out of which no one can make anything, or you look at your own life and your own part in the universe as infinitely rich, full of inexhaustible interest, opening out into the infinite further responsibilities for study and contemplation and interest and praise. Beyond all and in all is God.
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The least of the work of learning is done in classrooms.
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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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Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.
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Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are.
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