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A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair.
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
Life
Hopeless
Literally
Despair
Problems
Problem
May
Without
Verges
Always
Verge
More quotes by Thomas Merton
The meaning of life is found in openness to being and being present in full awareness.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found.
Thomas Merton
That is God's call to us - simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.
Thomas Merton
We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others.
Thomas Merton
Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.
Thomas Merton
The goal of fasting is inner unity.
Thomas Merton
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
The camera does not know what it takes it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.
Thomas Merton
The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will.
Thomas Merton
The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.
Thomas Merton
Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.
Thomas Merton
We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to like one another.
Thomas Merton
For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness
Thomas Merton
If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is just glass.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
Humility is the surest sign of strength.
Thomas Merton
The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.
Thomas Merton
