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A humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact, he is not afraid of anything, even himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God.

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
Men
Afraid
Since
Perfect
Fact
Implies
Facts
Humble
Power
Humility
Anything
Confidence
Even
Failure

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And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.
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I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.
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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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Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.
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The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.
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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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Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
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Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.
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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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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.
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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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Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
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What do you want to want to be, anyway? I don't know I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic. What you should say--he told me--what you should say is that you want to be a saint.
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While some men see ordinary happenings, others see divine light and guidance.
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Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence.
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A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
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Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which... are just the opposite of what we were made for?
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Those who think they 'know' from the beginning will never in fact come to know anything.
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Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.
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To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.
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