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The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.

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
Makes
Mere
Human
Lies
Tainted
Humans
Wisdom
Cult
Whole
Pleasure
Devoted
Race
Selfishness
Age
Error
Lying
Acts
Less
Errors

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Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
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The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude.
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Love is our true destiny.
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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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For the sinful self is not my real self, it is not the self YOU have wanted for me, only the self that I have wanted : And I no longer want this false self. But now, Father, I come to You in your own Son's self ... and it is He Who Presents me to You.
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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.
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If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.
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Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. Or perhaps he is afraid of you because he feels that you are afraid of him. And perhaps if he believed you are capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy.
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Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
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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.
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Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.
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Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.
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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.
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Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.
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Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.
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The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.
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Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation.
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May we all grow in grace and peace and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us.
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The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of Christian thought has seriously impaired this capacity, which nonviolence must recover.
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What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.
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