To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.
THOMAS MERTONLove is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.
More Thomas Merton Quotes
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Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another.
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The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
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Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.
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Our real journey in life is interior.
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The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.
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Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.
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Weaknesses and deficiencies play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another.
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Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.
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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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Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible.
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People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
THOMAS MERTON -
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.
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Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within.
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Our real journey in life is interior; It is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary to respond to that action.
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Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally.
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People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
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We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.
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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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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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When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable.
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Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn’t already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
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A faith that is afraid of other people is no faith at all.
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The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.
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The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.
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From the moment you put a piece of bread in your mouth you are part of the world. Who grew the wheat? Who made the bread? Where did it come from? You are in relationship with all who brought it to the table. We are least separate and most in common when we eat and drink.
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Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.
THOMAS MERTON