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.
THOMAS MERTONPeople 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.
More Thomas Merton Quotes
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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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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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In a world of noise, confusion and conflict it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace. In such places love can blossom.
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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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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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Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.
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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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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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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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Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
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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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Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.
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No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.
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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 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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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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A faith that is afraid of other people is no faith at all.
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If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.
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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?
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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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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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The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.
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Every breath we draw is a gift of God’s love; every moment of existence is a grace.
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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.
THOMAS MERTON