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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
Thinking
Beginning
Fact
Facts
Anything
Come
Never
Think

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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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The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
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Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.
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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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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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A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass
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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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Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.
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The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.
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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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The grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.
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Be still: There is no longer any need of comment. It was a lucky wind That blew away his halo with his cares, A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.
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To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions.
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Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.
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We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.
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They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.
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Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
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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.
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Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.
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Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action.
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