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.
THOMAS MERTONFrom 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.
More Thomas Merton Quotes
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When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God.
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The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.
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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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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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Our real journey in life is interior.
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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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In Silence God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.
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A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
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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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You are made in the image of what you desire.
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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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Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.
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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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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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Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
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Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.
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We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.
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The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.
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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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Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.
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Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God: for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice and mediocrity and materialism and selfishness that have chilled his faith.
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We are not converted only once in our lives but many times and this endless series of conversions and inner revolutions leads to our transformation.
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For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air.
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You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
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For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God’s will, to be what God wants us to be.
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Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am.
THOMAS MERTON