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Thomas Merton - From the Ambition category:
The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Art category:
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Choices category:
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Desire category:
Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Dissatisfaction category:
Paradoxically, I have found peace because I have always been dissatisfied. My moments of depression and despair turn out to be renewals, new beginnings. If I were once to settle down and be satisfied with the surface of life, with its divisions and its cliches, it would be time to call in the undertaker... So, then, this dissatisfaction which sometimes used to worry me and has certainly, I know, worried others, has helped me in fact to move freely and even gaily with the stream of life. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Dreams category:
A daydream is an evasion. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Education category:
The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Ego category:
To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Experience category:
Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Experience category:
The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive of perception. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Faith category:
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. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Fire category:
-on Vincent Van Gogh...
Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Fire category:
The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Frustration category:
I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Happiness category:
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Hope category:
-in a letter to a friend...
Do not depend on the hope of results... you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself... (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Humility category:
Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Journey category:
How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city? (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Journey category:
The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Loneliness category:
Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Love category:
Love is an intensification of life. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Love category:
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Mistakes category:
We stumble and fall constantly, even when we are most enlightened. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Peace category:
We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Possessions category:
The tighter you squeeze, the less you have. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Prayer category:
In meditative prayer, one thinks and speaks not only with the mind and lips, but in a certain sense with one's whole being... All good meditative prayer is a conversation of our entire self to God. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Religion category:
Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Religion category:
If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Responsibility category:
In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Searching category:
We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Silence category:
One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Solitude category:
Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Spirituality category:
Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Strength category:
Perhaps I am stronger than I think. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Success category:
I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Suffering category:
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 because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt. (Thomas Merton)
Thomas Merton - From the Time category:
Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success and they are in such haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity. (Thomas Merton)
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