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The meaning of life is found in openness to being and being present in full awareness.

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
Openness
Awareness
Meaning
Present
Full
Found

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe.
Thomas Merton
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Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
Thomas Merton
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If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.
Thomas Merton
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We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of God in this life, and that is why we are travelling and in darkness. But we already possess Him by grace, and therefore in that sense we have arrived and are dwelling in the light. But oh! How far have I to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived!
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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....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
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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.
Thomas Merton
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For although God is right with us and in us and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find him.
Thomas Merton
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While some men see ordinary happenings, others see divine light and guidance.
Thomas Merton
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The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.
Thomas Merton
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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
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You are made in the image of what you desire.
Thomas Merton
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I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to.
Thomas Merton
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How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived.
Thomas Merton
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Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good.
Thomas Merton
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How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city?
Thomas Merton
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... but any fool knows that you don't need money to get enjoyment out of life.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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No matter how ruined man and his world may seem to be, and no matter how terrible man's despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning.
Thomas Merton
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Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees.
Thomas Merton