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Those who think they 'know' from the beginning will never in fact come to know anything.

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
Think
Thinking
Beginning
Fact
Facts
Anything
Come
Never

More quotes by 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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The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe.
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When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago.
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God, have mercy on me in the blindness in which I hope I am seeking You!
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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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We are not converted only once in our lives but many times and this endless series of conversions and inner revolutions leads to our transformation.
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Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good.
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The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.
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Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found.
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My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear.
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And of course most non-Catholics imagine that the Church is immensely rich, and that all Catholic institutions make money hand over fist, and that all the money is stored away somewhere to buy gold and silver dishes for the Pope and cigars for the College of Cardinals.
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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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We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God
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Either you look at the universe as a very poor creation out of which no one can make anything, or you look at your own life and your own part in the universe as infinitely rich, full of inexhaustible interest, opening out into the infinite further responsibilities for study and contemplation and interest and praise. Beyond all and in all is God.
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Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
Thomas Merton
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Today will never come again.
Thomas Merton
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In the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong.
Thomas Merton
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To be alone by being part of the universe-fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without.
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Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation.
Thomas Merton
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The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.
Thomas Merton