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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
Discovery
Already
Five
Found
Find
Something
Reread
Years
Newest
Journal
More quotes by Thomas Merton
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
The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.
Thomas Merton
Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are.
Thomas Merton
The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe.
Thomas Merton
Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which... are just the opposite of what we were made for?
Thomas Merton
We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of God in this life, and that is why we are travelling and in darkness. But we already possess Him by grace, and therefore in that sense we have arrived and are dwelling in the light. But oh! How far have I to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived!
Thomas Merton
Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.
Thomas Merton
If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is just glass.
Thomas Merton
One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us.
Thomas Merton
One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.
Thomas Merton
Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything.
Thomas Merton
They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.
Thomas Merton
Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
Thomas Merton
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
We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to like one another.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.
Thomas Merton
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.
Thomas Merton
