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For power can guarantee the interests of some men but it can never foster the good of man. Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all the others. Only love can attain and preserve the good of all. Any claim to build the security of all on force is a manifest imposture.

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
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Power
Interests
Guarantee
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Claims
Attain
Always
Build
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Never
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Preserve
Men
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Love
Interest
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Protects
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Foster

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For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air.
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Cupidity...takes created things for ends in themselves, which they are not. The will that seeks rest in creatures for their own sake stops on the way to its true end, terminates in a value which does not exist, and thus frustrates all its deepest capacities for happiness and peace.
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One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife.
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While some men see ordinary happenings, others see divine light and guidance.
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If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.
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The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.
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The least of the work of learning is done in classrooms.
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When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.
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Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.
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Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.
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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.
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The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.
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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 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.
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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
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Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love.
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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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I was not sure where I was going, and I could not see what I would do when I got [there]. But you saw further and clearer than I, and you opened the seas before my ship, whose track led me across the waters to a place I had never dreamed of, and which you were even then preparing to be my rescue and my shelter and my home.
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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.
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A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass
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