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

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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Love is perfect in proportion to it's freedom.
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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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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Our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. Without wisdom, the apparent opposition of action and contemplation, of work and rest, of involvement and detachment, can never be resolved.
Thomas Merton
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Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Thomas Merton
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The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.
Thomas Merton
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The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth.
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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Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.
Thomas Merton
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Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost
Thomas Merton
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Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.
Thomas Merton
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Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not what he ought to be. If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we do away with him altogether.
Thomas Merton
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A daydream is an evasion.
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.
Thomas Merton
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To be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.
Thomas Merton