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.
THOMAS MERTONOur job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.
More Thomas Merton Quotes
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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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No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.
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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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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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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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A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy.
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Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.
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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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I see no contradiction between Buddhism and Christianity. I intend to become as good a Buddhist as I can.
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A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.
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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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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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In Silence God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.
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Our real journey in life is interior.
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How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me?
THOMAS MERTON