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

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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The only true liberty is in the service of that which is beyond all limits, beyond all definitions, beyond all human appreciation: that which is All, and which therefore is no limited or individual thing: The All is no-thing, for if it were to be a single thing separated from all other things, it would not be All.
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That is God's call to us - simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.
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We are already ONE. We just think we are separate.
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Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice.
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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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Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.
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The only unhappiness is not to love God.
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We thank Him less by words than by the serene happiness of silent acceptance. It is our emptiness in the presence of His reality, our silence in the presence of His infinitely rich silence, our joy in the bosom of the serene darkness in which His light holds us absorbed, it is all this that praises Him.
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A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair.
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The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable
Thomas Merton
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The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.
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Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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None of our prayers should ever be petitions for our own needs: for this is only another subtle way of trying to put ourselves on the same plane as God — acting as if we had no needs, as if we were not creatures, not dependent on Him.
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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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We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human and visible means, nor rests in any visible end. He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.
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There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.
Thomas Merton
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People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.
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The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68
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The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.
Thomas Merton