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The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer

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
True
Midst
Even
Discovered
Work
Findings
Finding
Prayer
Contemplative
Working
Detachment
Spirit
Recollection
Art
Leisure

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The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.
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May God prevent us from becoming right-thinking men-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.
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The biggest disease in North America is busyness.
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O God, my God, the night has values that the day never dreamed of.
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Those who think they 'know' from the beginning will never in fact come to know anything.
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The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.
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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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The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.
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The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.
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I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to.
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Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.
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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.
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There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude.
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No matter how ruined man and his world may seem to be, and no matter how terrible man's despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning.
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To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect on me is to live on the doorstep of hell. Selfishness is doomed to frustration centered as it is upon a lie. To live exclusively for myself, I must make all things bend themselves to my will as if I were a god.
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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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The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude.
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Ultimately faith is the only key to the universe. The final meaning of human existence, and the answers to the questions on which all our happiness depends cannot be found in any other way.
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If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.
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The land which thou goest to possess is not like the land of Egypt from whence thou camest out... For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord...Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near...Why do you spend money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which doth not satisfy you?
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