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The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the other.... The whole purpose of life is to live by love.

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
Live
Whole
Keen
Love
Based
Life
Awareness
Compassion
Purpose
Idea
Ideas

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.
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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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Love is the door to eternity.
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The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a man's life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul.
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When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat when we see children in a moment when they are really children.
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Violence is essentially wordless. and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.
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Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it.
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A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass
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But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.
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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.
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I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.
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Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.
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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.
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In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.
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The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
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We are already ONE. We just think we are separate.
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Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.
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Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between 'things' and 'God' as if God were another thing and as if creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God.
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Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
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There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.
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