Quote

To be risen with Christ means not only that one has a choice and that one may live by a higher law - the law of grace and love - but that one must do so. The first obligation of the Christian is to maintain their freedom from all superstitions, all blind taboos and religious formalities, indeed from all empty forms of legalism.

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
First
Freedom
Blind
Formality
Must
Christian
Empty
Taboo
Mean
Christ
Choice
Risen
Love
Means
Higher
Superstitions
Form
Grace
Maintain
May
Choices
Obligation
Formalities
Live
Law
Forms
Legalism
Firsts
Religious
Indeed
Taboos

More quotes by 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.
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You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
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The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.
Thomas Merton
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Meditation is one of the ways in which the spiritual man keeps himself awake.
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My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear.
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Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence.
Thomas Merton
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A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
Thomas Merton
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Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.
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Imagination has the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new.
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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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O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't.
Thomas Merton
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I shall lead you through the loneliness, the solitude you will not understand but it is my shortcut to your soul.
Thomas Merton
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The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to him.
Thomas Merton
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This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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....it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.
Thomas Merton
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Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself.
Thomas Merton
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How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived.
Thomas Merton
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In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.
Thomas Merton
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Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything.
Thomas Merton