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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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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
Around
Always
Life
Contemplative
Statues
Temptation
Wisdom
Making

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We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others.
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There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
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Saints are what they are not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everyone else.
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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.
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Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.
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Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.
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Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.
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Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered.
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It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. It is pure affection, and filled with reverance for the solitude of others. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.
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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.
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To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.
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To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason.
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The end of the world will be legal.
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Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.
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Our real journey in life is interior.
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If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is just glass.
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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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As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination.
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God, Who is everywhere, never leaves us. Yet He seems sometimes to be present, sometimes to be absent. If we do not know Him well, we do not realize that He may be more present to us when He is absent than when He is present.
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Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.
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