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We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others.

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
Others
Cannot
Love
Incapable
Selfish
Loving
Unless
Makes

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It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.
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Love is the door to eternity.
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Love is not a mere emotion or sentiment. It is the lucid and ardent responses of the whole person to a value that is revealed to him as perfect.
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Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally.
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Every man becomes the image of the God he adores. He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead. He who loves corruption rots. He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing.
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The least of the work of learning is done in classrooms.
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Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found.
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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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People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.
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What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.
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The married man and the mother of a Christian family, if they are faithful to their obligations, will fulfill a mission that is as great as it is consoling: that of bringing into the world and forming young souls capable of happiness and love, souls capable of sanctification and transformation in Christ.
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May we all grow in grace and peace and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us.
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The whole world has risen in Christ... If God is 'all in all,' then everything is in fact paradise, because it is filled with the glory and presence of God, and nothing is any more separated from God.
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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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There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.
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Since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to be affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs.
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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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The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds
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The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.
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