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In an age where there is much talk about being yourself, I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else.

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
Little
Cases
Right
Since
Much
Talk
Age
Adaptability
Chance
Reserve
Forget
Reserves
Else
Case
Littles
Anybody

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Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am.
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Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.
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Love is our true destiny.
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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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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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We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to like one another.
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Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.
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I was not sure where I was going, and I could not see what I would do when I got [there]. But you saw further and clearer than I, and you opened the seas before my ship, whose track led me across the waters to a place I had never dreamed of, and which you were even then preparing to be my rescue and my shelter and my home.
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We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!
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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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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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Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.
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No matter how ruined man and his world may seem to be, and no matter how terrible man's despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning.
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If we are to love sincerely, and with simplicity, we must first of all overcome the fear of not being loved.
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The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds
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For the sinful self is not my real self, it is not the self YOU have wanted for me, only the self that I have wanted : And I no longer want this false self. But now, Father, I come to You in your own Son's self ... and it is He Who Presents me to You.
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We must suffer. Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason. It helps think clearly, judge sanely. It strengthens the action of our will.
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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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The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.
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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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