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A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass

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
Search
Sitting
Men
Like
Searching
Ass
Enlightenment

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The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable
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Christ is born to us today, in order that he may appear to the whole world through us.
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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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You are made in the image of what you desire.
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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.
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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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Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.
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The simplicity that all this presupposes is not easy to attain. I find that my life constantly threatens to become complex and divisive. A life of prayer is basically a very simple life. This simplicity, however, is the result of asceticism and effort: it is not a spontaneous simplicity.
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Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.
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Every breath we draw is a gift of God's love every moment of existence is a grace.
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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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Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a savior.
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Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.
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Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.
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Curiously, the most serious religious people, or the most concerned scholars, those who constantly read the Bible as a matter of professional or pious duty, can often manage to evade a radically involved dialogue with the book they are questioning.
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Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
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If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.
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The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.
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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.
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This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality, consists not in getting rid of the self but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first.
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