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If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.

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
Unify
Either
Spiritual
Must
Life

More quotes by Thomas Merton

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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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To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything.
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It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as Gods will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe youtry to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as Gods will yourself!
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Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love.
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Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.
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Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are.
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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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May God prevent us from becoming right-thinking men-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.
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Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest.
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Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.
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My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear.
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My life is ... a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though 1 were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the love and protection of Him who guides me.
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If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him.
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How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived.
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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.
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A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair.
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We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.
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The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will.
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Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.
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The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.
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