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When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago.
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
Journal
Discovery
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More quotes by Thomas Merton
It is the will of God that we live not only as rational beings, but as new men regenerated by the Holy Spirit in Christ. It is His will that we reach out for our inheritance, that we answer His call to be His sons. We are born men without our consent, but the consent to be sons of God has to be elicited by our own free will.
Thomas Merton
Ultimately faith is the only key to the universe. The final meaning of human existence, and the answers to the questions on which all our happiness depends cannot be found in any other way.
Thomas Merton
There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.
Thomas Merton
The problem today is that there are no deserts, only dude ranches.
Thomas Merton
It seems to me that the darkness that has troubled you ... comes from one very serious source. Without wanting to be in conflict with the truth and with the will of God, we are actually going against God's will and His teaching.
Thomas Merton
The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love, and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.
Thomas Merton
A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.
Thomas Merton
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
If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is just glass.
Thomas Merton
Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.
Thomas Merton
O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't.
Thomas Merton
October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.
Thomas Merton
Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a savior.
Thomas Merton
Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered.
Thomas Merton
Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.
Thomas Merton
If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology. For religion goes beyond words and actions, and attains to the ultimate Truth only in silence and Love.
Thomas Merton
Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk's life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.
Thomas Merton
A gentle sense of humor will be alert to detect anything that savors of a pious 'act' on the part of the penitent.
Thomas Merton
