"The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places."
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Quote collection
Thomas Merton quotes (page 14 of 31)
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"When ambition ends, happiness begins."
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"The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis, but first of all by living. For until we have begun to live our prudence has no material to work on. And until we have begun to fail we have no way of working out our success."
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"Contemplation in the age of Auschwitz and Dachau, Solovky and Karaganda is something darker and more fearsome than contemplation in the age of the Church Fathers. For that very reason, the urge to seek a path of spiritual light can be a subtle temptation to sin. It certainly is sin if it means a frank rejection of the burden of our age, an escape into unreality and spiritual illusion, so as not to share the misery of other men."
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"To hope is to risk frustration. Make up your mind to risk frustration."
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"October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and crimson, and all the lassitudes of August have seeped out of your blood, and you are full of ambition. It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all."
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"God has brought me to Kentucky...the precise place he has chosen for my sanctification."
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"The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68"
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"The root of war is fear."
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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"
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"But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for."
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"Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself."
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"How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city?"
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"In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart."
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"The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear."
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"The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them."
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"If you have love you will do all things well."
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"We do not pray for the sake of praying, but for the sake of being heard. We do not pray in order to listen to ourselves praying but in order that God may hear us and answer us. Also, we do not pray in order to receive just any answer: it must be God's answer."
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"When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer."
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"The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them that the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which “God is satisfied," and after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men."
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