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Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts 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
Attempts
Failure
Risk
Rather
Anything
Never
More quotes by Thomas Merton
In the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong.
Thomas Merton
Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between 'things' and 'God' as if God were another thing and as if creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is just glass.
Thomas Merton
One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.
Thomas Merton
To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, and no man is saved by his own sufferings. To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ more, it is to know the love of Christ Who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ.
Thomas Merton
By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
Thomas Merton
Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
....it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.
Thomas Merton
Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.
Thomas Merton
Stop asking yourself questions that have no meaning. Or if they have, you'll find out when you need to -- find out both the questions and the answers.
Thomas Merton
When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.
Thomas Merton
O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't.
Thomas Merton
Our real journey in life is interior It is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary to respond to that action.
Thomas Merton
Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
Thomas Merton
The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
