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For although God is right with us and in us and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find him.

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
Journeys
Although
Journey
Find
Right

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it.
Thomas Merton
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If you have love you will do all things well.
Thomas Merton
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Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.
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The simplicity that all this presupposes is not easy to attain. I find that my life constantly threatens to become complex and divisive. A life of prayer is basically a very simple life. This simplicity, however, is the result of asceticism and effort: it is not a spontaneous simplicity.
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God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of him. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But if I am true to the concept that God utters in me, if I am true to the thought of Him that I was meant to embody, I shall be full of his actuality and find him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere.
Thomas Merton
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We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human and visible means, nor rests in any visible end. He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.
Thomas Merton
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The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.
Thomas Merton
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Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters.
Thomas Merton
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For power can guarantee the interests of some men but it can never foster the good of man. Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all the others. Only love can attain and preserve the good of all. Any claim to build the security of all on force is a manifest imposture.
Thomas Merton
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Meditation is one of the ways in which the spiritual man keeps himself awake.
Thomas Merton
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As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination.
Thomas Merton
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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.
Thomas Merton
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It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.
Thomas Merton
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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
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We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to like one another.
Thomas Merton
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We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation
Thomas Merton
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The goal of fasting is inner unity.
Thomas Merton
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In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.
Thomas Merton
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Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost
Thomas Merton
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Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.
Thomas Merton