"We cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great."
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Quote collection
Thomas Merton quotes (page 5 of 31)
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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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"To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything."
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"A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly."
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"Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things."
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"We stumble and fall constantly, even when we are most enlightened."
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"We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest."
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"What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?"
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"The grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference."
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"Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false Self. We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves."
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"If we wait for some people to become agreeable or attractive before we begin to love them, we will never begin. If we are content to give them a cold impersonal 'charity' that is merely a matter of obligation, we will not trouble to understand them or to sympathize with them at all. And in that case we will not really love them, because love implies an efficacious will not only to do good to others exteriorly but also to find some good in them to which we can respond.""
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"Prayer is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him...who loves us, who is near to us."
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"The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear Brothers [and Sisters], we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are."
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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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"We too often forget that faith is a matter of questioning and struggle before it becomes one of certitude and peace. You have to doubt and reject everything else in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after you have begun to believe, your faith itself must be tested and purified. Christianity is not merely a set of forgone conclusions. Faith tends to be defeated by the burning presence of God in mystery, and seeks refuge from him, flying to comfortable social forms and safe convictions in which purification is no longer an inner battle but a matter of outward gesture."
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"Contemplation is life itself, fully awake, fully active, and fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source."
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"The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer."
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"The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives."
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"True encounter with Christ liberates something in us, a power we did not know we had, a hope, a capacity for life, a resilience, an ability to bounce back when we thought we were completely defeated, a capacity to grow and change, a power of creative transformation."
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"Love in fact is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions."
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