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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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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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The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
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We cannot find Him unless we know we need Him. We forget this need when we take a self-sufficient pleasure in our own good works. The poor and helpless are the first to find Him, Who came to seek and to save that which was lost.
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In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
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Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
Thomas Merton
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In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.
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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I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God.
Thomas Merton
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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.
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If you have love you will do all things well.
Thomas Merton
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The camera does not know what it takes it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.
Thomas Merton
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The end of the world will be legal.
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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.
Thomas Merton
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The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the other.... The whole purpose of life is to live by love.
Thomas Merton
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Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
Thomas Merton
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Those who think they 'know' from the beginning will never in fact come to know anything.
Thomas Merton
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What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.
Thomas Merton
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To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions.
Thomas Merton
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Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between 'things' and 'God' as if God were another thing and as if creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God.
Thomas Merton
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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!
Thomas Merton