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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.

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

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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We love the things we pretend to laugh at.
Thomas Merton
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What do you want to want to be, anyway? I don't know I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic. What you should say--he told me--what you should say is that you want to be a saint.
Thomas Merton
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Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. Or perhaps he is afraid of you because he feels that you are afraid of him. And perhaps if he believed you are capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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If we are to love sincerely, and with simplicity, we must first of all overcome the fear of not being loved.
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.
Thomas Merton
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Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself.
Thomas Merton
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The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical.
Thomas Merton
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Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found.
Thomas Merton
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Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Thomas Merton
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Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.
Thomas Merton
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In an age where there is much talk about being yourself, I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else.
Thomas Merton
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Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.
Thomas Merton
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To be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.
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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To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything.
Thomas Merton
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Business is not the supreme virtue, and sanctity is not measured by the amount of work we accomplish. Perfection is found in the purity of our love for God, and this pure love is a delicate plant that grows best where there is plenty of time for it to mature
Thomas Merton
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To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair.
Thomas Merton
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The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a man's life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul.
Thomas Merton
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Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action.
Thomas Merton