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Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.

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
Oneself
Relationship
Free
Living
Others
Separateness
True
Contemplative
Nature
Illusions
Illusion

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The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to him.
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The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself.
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A faith that is afraid of other people is no faith at all.
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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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Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.
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Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.
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You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
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The goal of fasting is inner unity.
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Our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. Without wisdom, the apparent opposition of action and contemplation, of work and rest, of involvement and detachment, can never be resolved.
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It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.
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The biggest disease in North America is busyness.
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Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are.
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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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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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A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass
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Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally.
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We thank Him less by words than by the serene happiness of silent acceptance. It is our emptiness in the presence of His reality, our silence in the presence of His infinitely rich silence, our joy in the bosom of the serene darkness in which His light holds us absorbed, it is all this that praises Him.
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A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.
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Infinite sharing is the law of God s inner life.
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