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I Just Remember Their Kindness And Goodness To Me, And Their Peacefulness And Their Utter Simplicity. They Inspired Real Reverence, And I Think, In A Way, They Were Certainly Saints. And They Were Saints In That Most Effective And Telling Way: Sanctified By Leading Ordinary Lives In A Completely Supernatural Manner, Sanctified By Obscurity, By Usual Skills, By Common Tasks, By Routine, But Skills, Tasks, Routine Which Received A Supernatural Form From Grace Within.

-Thomas Merton

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I Just Remember Their

Thomas Merton

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I Just Remember Their Kindness And Goodness To Me, And Their Peacefulness And Their Utter Simplicity. They Inspired Real Reverence, And I Think, In A Way, They Were Certainly Saints. And They Were Saints In That Most Effective And Telling Way: Sanctified By Leading Ordinary Lives In A Completely Supernatural Manner, Sanctified By Obscurity, By Usual Skills, By Common Tasks, By Routine, But Skills, Tasks, Routine Which Received A Supernatural Form From Grace Within.

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Silence Has Many Dimensions. It Can Be A Regression And An Escape, A Loss Of Self, Or It Can Be Presence, Awareness, Unification, Self-discovery. Negative Silence Blurs And Confuses Our Identity, And We Lapse Into Daydreams Or Diffuse Anxieties. Positive Silence Pulls Us Together And Makes Us Realize Who We Are, Who We Might Be, And The Distance Between These Two.

Life Is This Simple: We Are Living In A World That Is Absolutely Transparent And The Divine Is Shining Through It All The Time. This Is Not Just A Nice Story Or A Fable, It Is True.

We Have What We Seek, It Is There All The Time, And If We Give It Time, It Will Make Itself Known To Us.

The Peace Produced By Grace Is A Spiritual Stability Too Deep For Violence — It Is Unshakeable

Love Seeks One Thing Only: The Good Of The One Loved. It Leaves All The Other Secondary Effects To Take Care Of Themselves. Love, Therefore, Is Its Own Reward.

Love Is Free; It Does Not Depend On The Desirability Of Its Object, But Loves For Love's Sake.

My Best Writing Has Always Been In Journals.

In The Spiritual Life There Is No Such Thing As An Indifference To Love Or Hate.

The Man Of Faith Who Has Never Experienced Doubt Is Not A Man Of Faith.

It Is Both Dangerous And Easy To Hate Man As He Is Because He Is Not What He Ought To Be. If We Do Not First Respect What He Is We Will Never Suffer Him To Become What He Ought To Be: In Our Impatience We Do Away With Him Altogether.

Finally I Am Coming To The Conclusion That My Highest Ambition Is To Be What I Already I Am.

Indeed, It Is A Kind Of Quintessence Of Pride To Hate And Fear Even The Kind And Legitimate Approval Of Those Who Love Us! I Mean, To Resent It As A Humiliating Patronage.

I Was Not Sure Where I Was Going, And I Could Not See What I Would Do When I Got [there]. But You Saw Further And Clearer Than I, And You Opened The Seas Before My Ship, Whose Track Led Me Across The Waters To A Place I Had Never Dreamed Of, And Which You Were Even Then Preparing To Be My Rescue And My Shelter And My Home.

The World Of Men Has Forgotten The Joys Of Silence, The Peace Of Solitude, Which Is Necessary, To Some Extent, For The Fullness Of Human Living. Man Cannot Be Happy For Long Unless He Is In Contact With The Springs Of Spiritual Life Which Are Hidden In The Depths Of His Own Soul. If Man Is Exiled Constantly From His Own Home, Locked Out Of His Spiritual Solitude, He Ceases To Be A True Person.

In General, It Can Be Said That No Contemplative Life Is Possible Without Ascetic Self-discipline. One Must Learn To Survive Without The Habit-forming Luxuries Which Get Such A Hold On Men Today. I Do Not Say That To Be A Contemplative One Absolutely Has To Go Without Smoking Or Without Alcohol, But Certainly One Must Be Able To Use These Things Without Being Dominated By An Uncontrolled Need For Them.

Contemplative Life

May We All Grow In Grace And Peace And Not Neglect The Silence That Is Printed In The Center Of Our Being. It Will Not Fail Us.

The Things I Thought Were So Important -- Because Of The Effort I Put Into Them -- Have Turned Out To Be Of Small Value. And The Things I Never Thought About, The Things I Was Never Able To Either To Measure Or To Expect, Were The Things That Mattered.

The Whole World Is Charged With The Glory Of God And I Feel Fire And Music Under My Feet.

The Camera Does Not Know What It Takes; It Captures Materials With Which You Reconstruct, Not So Much What You Saw As What You Thought You Saw. Hence The Best Photography Is Aware, Mindful, Of Illusion And Uses Illusion, Permitting And Encouraging It - Especially Unconscious And Powerful Illusions That Are Not Usually Admitted On The Scene.

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.

God Himself Begins To Live In Me Not Only As My Creator But As My Other And True Self.

Love Is Not A Mere Emotion Or Sentiment. It Is The Lucid And Ardent Responses Of The Whole Person To A Value That Is Revealed To Him As Perfect.

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.

What We Have To Be Is What We Are.

For The Birds There Is Not A Time That They Tell, But The Point Vierge Between Darkness And Light, Between Being And Nonbeing. You Can Tell Yourself The Time By Their Waking, If You Are Experienced. But That Is Your Folly, Not Theirs.

In The Devil's Theology, The Important Thing Is To Be Absolutely Right And To Prove That Everybody Else Is Absolutely Wrong.

Despair Is The Absolute Extreme Of Self-love. It Is Reached When A Person Deliberately Turns His Back On All Help From Anyone Else In Order To Taste The Rotten Luxury Of Knowing Himself To Be Lost

We Thank Him Less By Words Than By The Serene Happiness Of Silent Acceptance. It Is Our Emptiness In The Presence Of His Reality, Our Silence In The Presence Of His Infinitely Rich Silence, Our Joy In The Bosom Of The Serene Darkness In Which His Light Holds Us Absorbed, It Is All This That Praises Him.

Advertising Treats All Products With The Reverence And The Seriousness Due To Sacraments.

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.

Self Improvement

The Solution Of The Problem Of Life Is Life Itself. Life Is Not Attained By Reason And Analysis But First Of All By Living.

I Stand Among You As One Who Offers A Small Message Of Hope. . . There Are Always People Who Dare To Seek On The Margin Of Society, Who Are Not Dependent On Social Acceptance, Not Dependent On Social Routine, And Prefer A Kind Of Free-floating Existence Under A State Of Risk.

Love Is Our True Destiny.

Our Real Journey In Life Is Interior.

Contemplation In The Age Of Auschwitz And Dachau, Solovky And Karaganda Is Something Darker And More Fearsome Than Contemplation In The Age Of The Church Fathers. For That Very Reason, The Urge To Seek A Path Of Spiritual Light Can Be A Subtle Temptation To Sin. It Certainly Is Sin If It Means A Frank Rejection Of The Burden Of Our Age, An Escape Into Unreality And Spiritual Illusion, So As Not To Share The Misery Of Other Men.

Everything In Modern City Life Is Calculated To Keep Man From Entering Into Himself And Thinking About Spiritual Things. Even With The Best Of Intentions A Spiritual Man Finds Himself Exhausted And Deadened And Debased By The Constant Noise Of Machines And Loudspeakers, The Dead Air And The Glaring Lights Of Offices And Shops, The Everlasting Suggestion Of Advertising And Propaganda. The Whole Mechanism Of Modern Life Is Geared For A Flight From God And From The Spirit Into The Wilderness Of Neurosis.

The Reality That Is Present To Us And In Us: Call It Being...silence. And The Simple Fact That By Being Attentive, By Learning To Listen (or Recovering The Natural Capacity To Listen) We Can Find Ourself Engulfed In Such Happiness That It Cannot Be Explained: The Happiness Of Being At One With Everything In That Hidden Ground Of Love For Which There Can Be No Explanations.... May We All Grow In Grace And Peace, And Not Neglect The Silence That Is Printed In The Center Of Our Being. It Will Not Fail Us.

Business Is Not The Supreme Virtue, And Sanctity Is Not Measured By The Amount Of Work We Accomplish. Perfection Is Found In The Purity Of Our Love For God, And This Pure Love Is A Delicate Plant That Grows Best Where There Is Plenty Of Time For It To Mature

When You See God In Everyone, Then They See God In You.

Our Minds Are Like Crows. They Pick Up Everything That Glitters, No Matter How Uncomfortable Our Nests Get With All That Metal In Them.

To Be Ordinary Is Not A Choice: It Is The Usual Freedom Of Men Without Visions.

My Lord God, I Have No Idea Where I Am Going. I Do Not See The Road Ahead Of Me. I Cannot Know For Certain Where It Will End. Nor Do I Really Know Myself, And The Fact That I Think That I Am Following Your Will Does Not Mean That I Am Actually Doing So. But I Believe That The Desire To Please You Does In Fact Please You. And I Hope I Have That Desire In All That I Am Doing.

There Are Days When I Am Convinced That Heaven Starts Already, Now, In This Ordinary Life Just As It Is, In All Its Incompleteness, Yet, This Is Where Heaven Starts.. See Within Yourself, If You Can Find It. I Walked Through The Field In Front Of The House, Lots Of Swallows Flying, Everywhere! Some Very Near Me..it Was Magical. "we Are Already One, Yet We Know It Not.

Just Remaining Quietly In The Presence Of God, Listening To Him, Being Attentive To Him, Requires A Lot Of Courage And Know-how.

In The End, It's The Reality Of Personal Realtionships That Save Everything.

The Devil Is No Fool. He Can Get People Feeling About Heaven The Way They Ought To Feel About Hell. He Can Make Them Fear The Means Of Grace The Way They Do Not Fear Sin. And He Does So, Not By Light But By Obscurity, Not By Realities But By Shadows; Not By Clarity And Substance, But By Dreams And The Creatures Of Psychosis. And Men Are So Poor In Intellect That A Few Cold Chills Down Their Spine Will Be Enough To Keep Them From Ever Finding Out The Truth About Anything.

It Is By The Holy Spirit That We Love Those Who Are United To Us In Christ. The More Plentifully We Have Received Of The Spirit Of Christ, The More Perfectly We Are Able To Love Them: And The More We Love Them The More We Receive The Spirit. It Is Clear, However, That Since We Love Them By The Spirit Who Is Given To Us By Jesus, It Is Jesus Himself Who Loves Them In Us.

Very Well, Then: Why Are You Attached To Any One Book, Or To The Words And Ways Of One Saint When He Himself Tells You To Let Them Go And Walk In Simplicity? To Hang On To Him As If To Make A Method Of Him Is To Contradict Him And To Go In The Opposite Direction To The One In Which He Would Have You Travel.

Lovely Morning! How Lovely Life Can Be!

We Too Often Forget That Faith Is A Matter Of Questioning And Struggle Before It Becomes One Of Certitude And Peace. You Have To Doubt And Reject Everything Else In Order To Believe Firmly In Christ, And After You Have Begun To Believe, Your Faith Itself Must Be Tested And Purified. Christianity Is Not Merely A Set Of Forgone Conclusions. Faith Tends To Be Defeated By The Burning Presence Of God In Mystery, And Seeks Refuge From Him, Flying To Comfortable Social Forms And Safe Convictions In Which Purification Is No Longer An Inner Battle But A Matter Of Outward Gesture.

But There Is No Substance Under The Things I Have Gathered Together About Me. I Am Hollow, And My Structure Of Pleasures And Ambitions Has No Foundation. I Am Objectified In Them. But They Are All Destined By Their Very Contingency To Be Destroyed. And When They Are Gone There Will Be Nothing Left Of Me But My Own Nakedness And Emptiness And Hollowness, To Tell Me That I Am A Mistake.

Violence Is Essentially Wordless. And It Can Begin Only Where Thought And Rational Communication Have Broken Down.

We Cannot Arrive At The Perfect Possession Of God In This Life, And That Is Why We Are Travelling And In Darkness. But We Already Possess Him By Grace, And Therefore In That Sense We Have Arrived And Are Dwelling In The Light. But Oh! How Far Have I To Go To Find You In Whom I Have Already Arrived!

True Happiness Is Found In Unselfish Love, A Love Which Increases In Proportion As It Is Shared.

Happiness And Love

To Be Unknown To God Is Altogether Too Much Privacy.

I Can Depend Less And Less On My Own Power And Sense Of Direction...it Is So Strange To Advance Backwards And Get Where You Are Going In A Totally Unexpected Way

There Are Crimes Which No One Would Commit As An Individual Which He Willingly And Bravely Commits When Acting In The Name Of His Society, Because He Has Been (too Easily) Convinced That Evil Is Entirely Different When It Is Done 'for The Common Good.'...one Might Point To The Way In Which Racial Hatreds And Even Persecution Are Admitted By People Who Consider Themselves, And Perhaps In Some Sense Are, Kind, Tolerant, Civilized And Even Humane.

The Pleasure Of A Good Act Is Something To Be Remembered - Not In Order To Feed Our Complacency But In Order To Remind Us That Virtuous Actions Are Not Only Possible And Valuable, But That They Can Become Easier And More Delightful And More Fruitful Than The Acts Of Vice Which Oppose And Frustrate Them.

The Beginning Of Love Is The Will To Let Those We Love Be Perfectly Themselves.

Unconditional Love

No Matter How Ruined Man And His World May Seem To Be, And No Matter How Terrible Man's Despair May Become, As Long As He Continues To Be A Man His Very Humanity Continues To Tell Him That Life Has A Meaning.

I Would Call The Attention Of The Reader To The Difference Between "reason" And "reasoning." Reason Is A Light, Reasoning A Process. Reason Is A Faculty, Reasoning An Exercise Of That Faculty. Reasoning Proceeds From One Truth To Another By Means Of Argumentation. This Generally Involves The Whole Mind In Labor And Complexity. But Reason Does Not Exist Merely In Order To Engage In Reasoning. The Process Is A Means To An End. The True Fulfillment Of Reason As A Faculty Is Found When It Can Embrace The Truth Simply And Without Labor In The Light Of Single Intuition.

Love Is Perfect In Proportion To It's Freedom.

The Evil In The World Is All Of Our Own Making, And It Proceeds Entirely From Our Ruthless, Senseless, Wasteful, Destructive, And Suicidal Neglect Of Our Own Being.

A Daydream Is An Evasion.

Conscience Is The Light By Which We Interpret The Will Of God In Our Own Lives.

To Find Love I Must Enter Into The Sanctuary Where It Is Hidden, Which Is The Mystery Of God.

We Do Not Want To Be Beginners. But Let Us Be Convinced Of The Fact That We Will Never Be Anything Else But Beginners, All Our Life!

Contemplation Is The Loving Sense Of This Life, This Presence And This Eternity.

If A Man Is To Live, He Must Be All Alive, Body, Soul, Mind, Heart, Spirit.

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.

Peace Demands The Most Heroic Labor And The Most Difficult Sacrifice.

Our 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.

To Be Truly Catholic Is Not Merely To Be Correct According To An Abstractly Universal Standard Of Truth, But Also And Above All To Be Able To Enter Into The Problems And The Joys Of All, To Understand All, To Be All Things To All.

As A Magnifying Glass Concentrates The Rays Of The Sun Into A Little Burning Knot Of Heat That Can Set Fire To A Dry Leaf Or A Piece Of Paper, So The Mystery Of Christ In The Gospel Concentrates The Rays Of God's Light And Fire To A Point That Sets Fire To The Spirit Of Man. ... Through The Glass Of His Incarnation He Concentrates The Rays Of His Divine Truth And Love Upon Us So That We Feel The Burn, And All Mystical Experience Is Communicated To Men Through The Man Christ.

When We Are Strong, We Are Always Much Greater Than The Things That Happen To Us.

To Allow Oneself To Be Carried Away By A Multitude Of Conflicting Concerns, To Surrender To Too Many Demands, To Commit Oneself To Too Many Projects, To Want To Help Everyone In Everything, Is To Succumb To The Violence Of Our Times.

When You Reread Your Journal You Find Out That Your Newest Discovery Is Something You Already Found Out Five Years Ago.

Action Is The Stream, And Contemplation Is The Spring.

The Imagination Should Be Allowed A Certain Amount Of Time To Browse Around.

The God Of Peace Is Never Glorified By Human Violence.

To Desire Him To Be Merciful To Us Is To Acknowledge Him As God. To Seek His Pity When We Deserve No Pity Is To Ask Him To Be Just With A Justice So Holy That It Knows No Evil And Shows Mercy To Everyone Who Does Not Fly From Him In Despair.

Acknowledge Him

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.

For Power Can Guarantee The Interests Of Some Men But It Can Never Foster The Good Of Man. Power Always Protects The Good Of Some At The Expense Of All The Others. Only Love Can Attain And Preserve The Good Of All. Any Claim To Build The Security Of All On Force Is A Manifest Imposture.

Humility Is A Virtue, Not A Neurosis.

In Humility Is The Greatest Freedom. As Long As You Have To Defend The Imaginary Self That You Think Is Important, You Lose Your Peace Of Heart.

We Stumble And Fall Constantly, Even When We Are Most Enlightened.

The Lights Of Prayer That Make Us Imagine We Are Beginning To Be Angels Are Sometimes Only Signs That We Are Finally Beginning To Be Men. We Do Not Have A High Enough Opinion Of Our Own Nature. We Think We Are At The Gates Of Heaven And We Are Only Just Beginning To Come Into Our Own Realm As Free And Intelligent Beings.

What Is 'grace'? It Is God's Own Life, Shared By Us. God's Life Is Love. Deus Caritas Est. By Grace We Are Able To Share In The Infinitely Selfless Love Of Him Who Is Such Pure Actuality That He Needs Nothing And Therefore Cannot Conceivably Exploit Anything For Selfish Ends. Indeed, Outside Of Him There Is Nothing, And Whatever Exists Exists By His Free Gift Of Its Being, So That One Of The Notions That Is Absolutely Contradictory To The Perfection Of God Is Selfishness.

The Meaning Of Life Is Found In Openness To Being And "being Present" In Full Awareness.

We Stumble And Fall Constantly Even When We Are Most Enlightened. But When We Are In True Spiritual Darkness, We Do Not Even Know That We Have Fallen.

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.

Merely To Resist Evil With Evil By Hating Those Who Hate Us And Seeking To Destroy Them, Is Actually No Resistance At All. It Is Active And Purposeful Collaboration In Evil That Brings The Christian Into Direct And Intimate Contact With The Same Source Of Evil And Hatred Which Inspires The Acts Of His Enemy. It Leads In Practice To A Denial Of Christ And To The Service Of Hatred Rather Than Love.

It Is In Deep Solitude And Silence That I Find The Gentleness With Which I Can Truly Love My Brother And Sister.

The Only True Liberty Is In The Service Of That Which Is Beyond All Limits, Beyond All Definitions, Beyond All Human Appreciation: That Which Is All, And Which Therefore Is No Limited Or Individual Thing: The All Is No-thing, For If It Were To Be A Single Thing Separated From All Other Things, It Would Not Be All.

We Love The Things We Pretend To Laugh At.

The Greatest Temptations Are Not Those That Solicit Our Consent To Obvious Sin, But Those That Offer Us Great Evils Masking As The Greatest Goods.

How Do You Expect To Arrive At The End Of Your Own Journey If You Take The Road To Another Man's City?

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.

The Only Trouble Is That In The Spiritual Life There Are No Tricks And No Shortcuts. Those Who Imagine That They Can Discover Spiritual Gimmicks And Put Them To Work For Themselves Usually Ignore God's Will And His Grace.

Every Other Man Is A Piece Of Myself, For I Am A Part And A Member Of Mankind.

Grains Of Error Planted Innocently In A Well-kept Greenhouse Can Become Giant Poisonous Trees.

Love Is The Epiphany Of God In Our Poverty.

The Silence Of The Spheres Is The Music Of A Wedding Feast. The More We Persist In Misunderstanding The Phenomena Of Life, The More We Analyze Them Out Into Strange Finalities And Complex Purposes Of Our Own, The More We Involve Ourselves In Sadness. But It Does Not Matter Much Because No Despair Of Ours Can Alter The Reality Of Things, Or Stain The Joy Of The Cosmic Dance Which Is Always There.

When We Are Alone On A Starlit Night, When By Chance We See The Migrating Birds In Autumn Descending On A Grove Of Junipers To Rest And Eat; When We See Children In A Moment When They Are Really Children, When We Know Love In Our Own Hearts; Or When, Like The Japanese Poet, Basho, We Hear An Old Frog Land In A Quiet Pond With A Solitary Splash - At Such Times The Awakening, The Turning Inside Out Of All Values, The "newness," The Emptiness And The Purity Of Vision That Make Themselves Evident, All These Provide A Glimpse Of The Cosmic Dance.

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.

For Language To Have Meaning, There Must Be Intervals Of Silence Somewhere, To Divide Word From Word And Utterance From Utterance. He Who Retires Into Silence Does Not Necessarily Hate Language. Perhaps It Is Love And Respect For Language Which Imposes Silence Upon Him. For The Mercy Of God Is Not Heard In Words Unless It Is Heard, Both Before And After The Words Are Spoken, In Silence.

The Whole Aim Of Zen Is Not To Make Foolproof Statements About Experience, But To Come To Direct Grips With Reality Without The Mediation Of Logical Verbalizing.

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.

Our Technological Society Has No Longer Any Place In It For Wisdom That Seeks Truth For Its Own Sake, That Seeks The Fullness Of Being, That Seeks To Rest In An Intuition Of The Very Ground Of All Being. Without Wisdom, The Apparent Opposition Of Action And Contemplation, Of Work And Rest, Of Involvement And Detachment, Can Never Be Resolved.

There Is Only One Problem On Which All My Existence, My Peace, My Happiness Depend: To Discover Myself In Discovering God. If I Find Him I Will Find Myself And If I Find My True Self I Will Find Him.

The Basic Problem Is Not Political, It Is Apolitical And Human. One Of The Most Important Things To Do Is To Keep Cutting Deliberately Through Political Lines And Barriers And Emphasizing The Fact That These Are Largely Fabrications And That There Is Another Dimension, A Genuine Reality, Totally Opposed To The Fictions Of Politics: The Human Dimension Which Politics Pretend To Arrogate Entirely To Themselves. This Is The Necessary First Step Along The Long Way Toward The Perhaps Impossible Task Of Purifying, Humanizing And Somehow Illuminating Politics Themselves.

Love Is A Special Way Of Being Alive.

To Worship Our False Selves Is To Worship Nothing. And The Worship Of Nothing Is Hell.

See, See Who God Is, See The Glory Of God, Going Up To Him Out Of This Incomprehensible And Infinite Sacrifice In Which All History Begins And Ends, All Individual Lives Begin And End, In Which Every Story Is Told, And Finished, And Settled For Joy Or For Sorrow: The One Point Of Reference For All The Truths That Are Outside Of God, Their Center, Their Focus: Love.

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.

Death Is Someone You See Very Clearly With Eyes In The Center Of Your Heart: Eyes That See Not By Reacting To Light, But By Reacting To A Kind Of A Chill From Within The Marrow Of Your Own Life.

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

There Is In All Visible Things An Invisible Fecundity, A Dimmed Light, A Meek Namelessness, A Hidden Wholeness.

There Is A Logic Of Language And A Logic Of Mathematics.

Duty Does Not Have To Be Dull. Love Can Make It Beautiful And Fill It With Life.

Life Reveals Itself To Us Only In So Far As Well Live It.

Contemplative Living Is Living In True Relationship With Oneself, God, Others And Nature, Free Of The Illusions Of Separateness.

True Relationship

A Tree Gives Glory To God By Being A Tree. For In Being What God Means It To Be It Is Obeying [god]. It “consents,” So To Speak, To [god's] Creative Love. It Is Expressing An Idea Which Is In God And Which Is Not Distinct From The Essence Of God, And Therefore A Tree Imitates God By Being A Tree

The Spiritual Life Is First Of All A Life. It Is Not Merely Something To Be Known And Studied, It Is To Be Lived.

We Do Not Pray For The Sake Of Praying, But For The Sake Of Being Heard. We Do Not Pray In Order To Listen To Ourselves Praying But In Order That God May Hear Us And Answer Us. Also, We Do Not Pray In Order To Receive Just Any Answer: It Must Be God's Answer.

Do Not Look For Rest In Any Pleasure, Because You Were Not Created For Pleasure: You Were Created For Joy. And If You Do Not Know The Difference Between Pleasure And Joy You Have Not Yet Begun To Live.

... Nothing Resembles Reality Less Than The Photograph. Nothing Resembles Substance Less Than Its Shadow. To Convey The Meaning Of Something Substantial You Have To Use Not A Shadow But A Sign, Not The Limitation But The Image. The Image Is A New And Different Reality, And Of Course It Does Not Convey An Impression Of Some Object, But The Mind Of The Subject; And That Is Something Else Again.

When We Are Alone On A Starlit Night, When By Chance We See The Migrating Birds In Autumn Descending On A Grove Of Junipers To Rest And Eat; When We See Children In A Moment When They Are Really Children.

I See No Contradiction Between Buddhism And Christianity ... I Intend To Become As Good A Buddhist As I Can.

Sincerity Must Be Bought At A Price: The Humility To Recognize Our Innumerable Errors, And Fidelity In Tirelessly Setting Them Right.

The Only Way To Make A Man Worthy Of Love Is By Loving Him.

The Man Who Lives In Division Is Living In Death. He Cannot Find Himself Because He Is Lost; He Has Ceased To Be A Reality. The Person He Believes Himself To Be Is A Bad Dream.

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.

Inspirational Love

When I Am Liberated By Silence, When I Am No Longer Involved In The Measurement Of Life, But In The Living Of It, I Can Discover A Form Of Prayer In Which There Is Effectively No Distraction. My Whole Life Becomes A Prayer. My Whole Silence Is Full Of Prayer. The World Of Silence In Which I Am Immersed Contributes To My Prayer.

Keeping A Journal Has Taught Me That There Is Not So Much New In Your Life As You Sometimes Think. When You Re-read Your Journal You Find Out That Your Latest Discovery Is Something You Already Found Out Five Years Ago. Still, It Is True That One Penetrates Deeper And Deeper Into The Same Ideas And The Same Experiences.

We Are Obliged To Love One Another. We Are Not Strictly Bound To 'like' One Another. Love Governs The Will: 'liking' Is A Matter Of Sense And Sensibility. Nevertheless, If We Really Love Others It Will Not Be Too Hard To Like Them Also.

Love One Another

The Hindus Are Not Looking For Us To Send Them Men Who Will Build Schools And Hospitals, Although Those Things Are Good And Useful In Themselves--and Perhaps Very Badly Needed In India: They Want To Know If We Have Any Saints To Send Them.

When Society Is Made Up Of Men Who Know No Interior Solitude It Can No Longer Be Held Together By Love: And Consequently It Is Held Together By A Violent And Abusive Authority. But When Men Are Violently Deprived Of The Solitude And Freedom Which Are Their Due, Then Society In Which They Live Becomes Putrid, It Festers With Servility, Resentment And Hate.

One Of The Strange Laws Of The Contemplative Life Is That In It You Do Not Sit Down And Solve Problems: You Bear With Them Until They Somehow Solve Themselves. Or Until Life Solves Them For You.

Contemplative Life

And That Is Why The Man Who Wants To See Clearly, Before He Will Believe, Never Starts On The Journey.

Faith Is A Light Of Such Supreme Brilliance That It Dazzles The Mind And Darkens All Its Visions Of Other Realities, But In The End When We Become Used To The New Light, We Gain A New View Of All Reality Transfigured And Elevated In The Light Itself.

If You Have Love You Will Do All Things Well.

To Love Blindly Is To Love Selfishly, Because The Goal Of Such Love Is Not The Real Advantage Of The Beloved But Only The Exercise Of Love In Our Own Souls.

There Is A Subtle But Inescapable Connection Between The "sacred" Attitude And The Acceptance Of One's In Most Self.

‎"our Job Is To Love Others Without Stopping To Inquire Whether Or Not They Are Worthy.

To Know The Cross Is Not Merely To Know Our Own Sufferings. For The Cross Is The Sign Of Salvation, And No Man Is Saved By His Own Sufferings. To Know The Cross Is To Know That We Are Saved By The Sufferings Of Christ; More, It Is To Know The Love Of Christ Who Underwent Suffering And Death In Order To Save Us. It Is, Then, To Know Christ.

If A Writer Is So Cautious That He Never Writes Anything That Cannot Be Criticized, He Will Never Be Able To Write Anything That Can Be Read. If You Want To Help Other People You Have Got To Make Up Your Mind To Write Things That Some Men Will Condemn.

My Own Personal Task Is Not Simply That Of Poet And Writer (still Less Commentator, Pseudo-prophet); It Is Basically To Praise God Out Of An Inner Center Of Silence, Gratitude, And 'awareness.' This Can Be Realized In A Life That Apparently Accomplishes Nothing. Without Centering On Accomplishment Or Nonaccomplishment, My Task Is Simply The Breathing Of This Gratitude From Day To Day, In Simplicity, And For The Rest Turning My Hand To Whatever Comes, Work Being Part Of Praise, Whether Splitting Logs Or Writing Poems, Or Best Of All Simple Notes.

Consequently, The Truth Of God Lives In Our Souls More By The Power Of Superior Moral Courage Than By The Light Of An Eminent Intelligence. Indeed, Spiritual Intelligence Itself Depends On The Fortitude And Patience With Which We Sacrifice Ourselves For The Truth, As It Is Communicated To Our Lives Concretely In The Providential Will Of God

The Peculiar Grace Of A Shaker Chair Is Due To The Fact That It Was Made By Someone Capable Of Believing That An Angel Might Come And Sit On It.

I Believe We Are Going To Have To Prepare Ourselves For The Difficult And Patient Task Of Outgrowing Rigid And Intransigent Nationalism, And Work Slowly Towards A World Federation Of Peaceful Nations. How Will This Be Possible? Don't Ask Me. I Don't Know. But Unless We Develop A Moral, Spiritual, And Political Wisdom That Is Proportionate To Our Technological Skill, Our Skill May End Us.

The Goal Of Fasting Is Inner Unity.

And The Deepest Level Of Communication Is Not Communication, But Communion. It Is Wordless. It Is Beyond Words, And It Is Beyond Speech, And It Is Beyond Concept.

There Is Not True Intimacy Between Souls Who Do Not Know How To Respect One Another's Solitude.

First Of All, Although Men Have A Common Destiny, Each Individual Also Has To Work Out His Own Personal Salvation For Himself In Fear And Trembling. We Can Help One Another To Find The Meaning Of Life No Doubt. But 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. You Cannot Tell Me Who I Am And I Cannot Tell You Who You Are. If You Do Not Know Your Own Identity, Who Is Going To Identify You?

True Encounter With Christ Liberates Something In Us, A Power We Did Not Know We Had, A Hope, A Capacity For Life, A Resilience, An Ability To Bounce Back When We Thought We Were Completely Defeated, A Capacity To Grow And Change, A Power Of Creative Transformation.

I Am Earth, Earth My Heart's Love Bursts With Hay And Flowers. I Am A Lake Of Blue Air In Which My Own Appointed Place Field And Valley Stand Reflected

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. You Gradually Struggle Less And Less For An Idea And More And More For Specific People. In The End, It Is The Reality Of Personal Relationship That Saves Everything.

Happiness Is Not A Matter Of Intensity But Of Balance And Order And Rhythm And Harmony.

What Does It Mean To Know And Experience My Own “nothingness?” It Is Not Enough To Turn Away In Disgust From My Illusions And Faults And Mistakes, To Separate Myself From Them As If They Were Not, And As If I Were Someone Other Than Myself. This Kind Of Self-annihilati On Is Only A Worse Illusion, It Is A Pretended Humility Which, By Saying “i Am Nothing” I Mean In Effect “i Wish I Were Not What I Am.

If You Have Never Had Any Distractions You Don't Know How To Pray.

Discovering Vocation Does Not Mean Scrambling Toward Some Prize Just Beyond My Reach But Accepting The Treasure Of True Self I Already Possess. Vocation Does Not Come From A Voice �out There� Calling Me To Be Something I Am Not. It Comes From A Voice �in Here� Calling Me To Be The Person I Was Born To Be, To Fulfill The Original Selfhood Given Me At Birth By God.

If Nothing That Can Be Seen Can Either Be God Or Represent Him To Us As He Is, Then To Find God We Must Pass Beyond Everything That Can Be Seen And Enter Into Darkness. Since Nothing That Can Be Heard Is God, To Find Him We Must Enter Into Silence. Since God Cannot Be Imagined, Anything Our Imagination Tells Us About Him Is Ultimately A Lie And Therefore We Cannot Know Him As He Really Is Unless We Pass Beyond Everything That Can Be Imagined And Enter Into An Obscurity Without Images And Without The Likeness Of Any Created Thing.

But Precisely This Illusion That Everything Is "clear" Is What Is Blinding Us All. It Is A Serious Temptation, And It Is A Subtle Form Of Pride And Worldly Love Of Power And Revenge.

Our Happiness Consists In Sharing The Happiness Of God, The Perfection Of His Unlimited Freedom, The Perfection Of His Love.

The Danger Of Education, I Have Found, Is That It So Easily Confuses Means With Ends. Worse Than That, It Quite Easily Forgets Both And Devotes Itself Merely To The Mass Production Of Uneducated Gradtuates - People Literaly Unfit For Anything Except To Take Part In An Elaborate And Completely Artificial Charade Which They And Their Contemporaries Have Conspired To Call "life".

The Cause Of Liberty Becomes A Mockery If The Price To Be Paid Is The Wholesale Destruction Of Those Who Are To Enjoy Liberty. Ghandi, Quoted In Merton, P. 68

Memory Is Corrupted And Ruined By A Crowd Of Memories. If I Am Going To Have A True Memory, There Are A Thousand Things That Must First Be Forgotten. Memory Is Not Fully Itself When It Reaches Only Into The Past. A Memory That Is Not Alive To The Present Does Not Remember The Here And Now, Does Not Remember Its True Identity, Is Not Memory At All. He Who Remembers Nothing But Facts And Past Events, And Is Never Brought Back Into The Present, Is A Victim Of Amnesia.

Our Knowledge Of God Is Perfected By Gratiitude: We Are Thankful And Rejoice In The Experience Of The Truth That He Is Love.

Knowledge Of God

The Only Right Way: To Love And Serve The Man Of The Modern World, But Not Simply To Succumb, With Him, To All His Illusions About The World.

Reason Is In Fact The Path To Faith, And Faith Takes Over When Reason Can Say No More.

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.

In Silence God Ceases To Be An Object And Becomes An Experience.

I Came With The Notion Of Perhaps Saying Something For Monks And To Monks Of All Religions Because I Am Supposed To Be A Monk. ... My Dear Brothers, We Are Already One. But We Imagine That We Are Not. And What We Have To Recover Is Our Original Unity. What We Have To Be Is What We Are

Curiously, The Most Serious Religious People, Or The Most Concerned Scholars, Those Who Constantly Read The Bible As A Matter Of Professional Or Pious Duty, Can Often Manage To Evade A Radically Involved Dialogue With The Book They Are Questioning.

Every Breath We Draw Is A Gift Of God's Love; Every Moment Of Existence Is A Grace.

The Whole Idea Of Compassion Is Based On A Keen Awareness Of The Other.... The Whole Purpose Of Life Is To Live By Love.

And Of Course Most Non-catholics Imagine That The Church Is Immensely Rich, And That All Catholic Institutions Make Money Hand Over Fist, And That All The Money Is Stored Away Somewhere To Buy Gold And Silver Dishes For The Pope And Cigars For The College Of Cardinals.

We Must Be True Inside, True To Ourselves, Before We Can Know A Truth That Is Outside Us. But We Make Ourselves True Inside By Manifesting The Truth As We See It.

The Light Of Truth Burns Without A Flicker In The Depths Of A House That Is Shaken With Storms Of Passion And Fear.

You Have Got Me Walking Up And Down All Day Under Those Trees, Saying To Me Over And Over Again, "solitude, Solitude." And You Have Turned Around And Thrown The World In My Lap. You Have Told Me, "leave All Things And Follow Me," And Then You Have Tied Half Of New York To My Foot Like A Ball And Chain. You Have Got Me Kneeling Behind That Pillar With My Mind Making A Noise Like A Bank. Is That Contemplation?

The Desire To Kill Is Like The Desire To Attack Another With An Ingot Of Red -hot Iron: I Have To Pick Up The Incandescent Metal And Burn My Own Hand While Burning The Other. Hate Itself Is The Seed Of Death In My Own Heart, While It Seeks The Death Of The Other.

Love Is The Door To Eternity.

The Fruitfulness Of Our Lives Depends In Large Measure In Our Ability To Doubt Our Own Words And To Question The Value Of Our Own Work. The Man Who Completely Trusts His Own Estimate Of Himself Is Doomed To Sterility.

O God, Teach Me To Be Satisfied With My Own Helplessness In The Spiritual Life. Teach Me To Be Content With Your Grace That Comes To Me In Darkness And That Works Things I Cannot See. Teach Me To Be Happy That I Can Depend On You. To Depend On You Should Be Enough For An Eternity Of Joy. To Depend On You By Itself Ought To Be Infinitely Greater Than Any Joy Which My Own Intellectual Appetite Could Desire.

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.

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.

A Christian Is Committed To The Belief That Love And Mercy Are The Most Powerful Forces On Earth.

Love Winter When The Plant Says Nothing.

Our Thought Should Not Merely Be An Answer To What Someone Else Has Just Said. Or What Someone Else Might Have Said. Our Interior World Must Be More Than An Echo Of The Words Of Someone Else. There Is No Point In Being A Moon To Somebody Else's Sun, Still Less Is There Any Justification For Our Being Moons Of One Another, And Hence Darkness To One Another, Not One Of Us Being A True Sun.

Self-conquest Is Really Self-surrender. Yet Before We Can Surrender Ourselves We Must Become Ourselves. For No One Can Give Up What He Does Not Possess.

The Deepest Level Of Communication Is Not Communication, But Communion. It Is Wordless. It Is Beyond Words, And It Is Beyond Speech, And It Is Beyond Concept. Not That We Discover A New Unity. We Discover An Older Unity. My Dear Brothers [and Sisters], We Are Already One. But We Imagine That We Are Not. And What We Have To Recover Is Our Original Unity. What We Have To Be Is What We Are.

The Most Awful Tyranny Is That Of The Proximate Utopia Where The Last Sins Are Currently Being Eliminated And Where, Tomorrow, There Will Be No More Sins Because All The Sinners Will Have Been Wiped Out.

My Lord God, I Have No Idea Where I Am Going. I Do Not See The Road Ahead Of Me...you Will Lead Me By The Right Road, Though I May Know Nothing About It. Therefore I Will Trust You Always Though I May Seem To Be Lost And In The Shadow Of Death. I Will Not Fear, For You Are Ever With Me, And You Will Never Leave Me To Face My Perils Alone.

Shadow Of Death

The Secret Of My Full Identity Is Hidden In Him. He Alone Can Make Me Who I Am, Or Rather Who I Will Be When At Last I Fully Begin To Be. But Unless I Desire This Identity And Work To Find It With Him And In Him, The Work Will Never Be Done

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.

God, Have Mercy On Me In The Blindness In Which I Hope I Am Seeking You!

Love Is Its Own Reward.

Unconditional Love

The Most Dangerous Man In The World Is The Contemplative Who Is Guided By Nobody. He Trusts His Own Visions. He Obeys The Attractions Of An Interior Voice But Will Not Listen To Other Men. He Identifies The Will Of God With Anything That Makes Him Feel, Within His Own Heart, A Big, Warm, Sweet Interior Glow. The Sweeter And The Warmer The Feeling Is, The More He Is Convinced Of His Own Infallibility.

On Pride: This Sickness Is Most Dangerous When It Succeeds In Looking Like Humility. When A Proud Man Thinks He Is Humble His Case Is Hopeless.

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