Quote

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.

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
Silence
Wife
Dark
Forest
Might
Warmth
Whole
Marry
World
Forests
Decided
Sweet

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The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.
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Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.
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A faith that is afraid of other people is no faith at all.
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It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not what he ought to be. If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we do away with him altogether.
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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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To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions.
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God, Who is everywhere, never leaves us. Yet He seems sometimes to be present, sometimes to be absent. If we do not know Him well, we do not realize that He may be more present to us when He is absent than when He is present.
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The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself.
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The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.
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Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.
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Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.
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I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God.
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The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.
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We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.
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I am beginning to realize that sanity is no longer a value or an end in itself. The sanity of modern man is about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of his surviv
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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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The end of the world will be legal.
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The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist....It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door.
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And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.
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Violence is essentially wordless. and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.
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