Quote

The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done

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
Never
Lasts
Fully
Last
Identity
Rather
Begin
Desire
Unless
Find
Full
Done
Wisdom
Work
Alone
Make
Secret
Hidden

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist....It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door.
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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.
Thomas Merton
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What do you want to want to be, anyway? I don't know I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic. What you should say--he told me--what you should say is that you want to be a saint.
Thomas Merton
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By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
Thomas Merton
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Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest.
Thomas Merton
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It is the will of God that we live not only as rational beings, but as new men regenerated by the Holy Spirit in Christ. It is His will that we reach out for our inheritance, that we answer His call to be His sons. We are born men without our consent, but the consent to be sons of God has to be elicited by our own free will.
Thomas Merton
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a man can radically change his life and attain to a deeper meaning, a more perfect integration, a more complete fulfillment, a more total liberty of spirit than are possible in the routines of a purely active existence centered on money-making.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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When ambition ends, happiness begins.
Thomas Merton
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Love is perfect in proportion to it's freedom.
Thomas Merton
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Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.
Thomas Merton
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Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.
Thomas Merton
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Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.
Thomas Merton
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Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk's life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.
Thomas Merton
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The end of the world will be legal.
Thomas Merton
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It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes.
Thomas Merton
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Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.
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