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The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.

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
Reflecting
Unconditional
Perfectly
Reflection
Relation
Beginning
Relationship
Love
Twists

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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We cannot find Him unless we know we need Him. We forget this need when we take a self-sufficient pleasure in our own good works. The poor and helpless are the first to find Him, Who came to seek and to save that which was lost.
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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.
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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.
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Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
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There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.
Thomas Merton
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The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.
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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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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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We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.
Thomas Merton
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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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Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice.
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We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it.
Thomas Merton
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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
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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
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat when we see children in a moment when they are really children.
Thomas Merton
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To be risen with Christ means not only that one has a choice and that one may live by a higher law - the law of grace and love - but that one must do so. The first obligation of the Christian is to maintain their freedom from all superstitions, all blind taboos and religious formalities, indeed from all empty forms of legalism.
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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.
Thomas Merton
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The least of the work of learning is done in classrooms.
Thomas Merton
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The biggest disease in North America is busyness.
Thomas Merton