Quote

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.

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
Moments
Awakening
Night
Birds
Starlit
Children
Bird
Migrating
Really
Awareness
Grove
Rest
Newness
Alone
Descending
Chance
Awakened
Moment
Autumn

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
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And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.
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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.
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There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude.
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Our real journey in life is interior It is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary to respond to that action.
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For although God is right with us and in us and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find him.
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The gift of love is the gift of the power and capacity to love, and therefore, to give love with full effect is also to receive it. So love can only be kept by being given away, and it can only be given perfectly when it is also received.
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It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as Gods will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe youtry to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as Gods will yourself!
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The things I thought were so important -- because of the effort I put into them -- have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.
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Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
Thomas Merton
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Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
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Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another.
Thomas Merton
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A faith that is afraid of other people is no faith at all.
Thomas Merton
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You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer.
Thomas Merton
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May God prevent us from becoming right-thinking men-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.
Thomas Merton
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
Thomas Merton
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Today will never come again.
Thomas Merton