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This Is The Greatest Stumbling Block In Our Spiritual Discipline, Which, In Actuality, Consists Not In Getting Rid Of The Self But In Realizing The Fact That There Is No Such Existence From The First.

-Thomas Merton

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This Is The Greatest

Thomas Merton

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This Is The Greatest Stumbling Block In Our Spiritual Discipline, Which, In Actuality, Consists Not In Getting Rid Of The Self But In Realizing The Fact That There Is No Such Existence From The First.

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For Every Gain In Deep Certitude There Is A Corresponding Growth Of Superficial "doubt." This Doubt Is By No Means Opposed To Genuine Faith, But It Mercilessly Examines And Questions The Spurious "faith" Of Everyday Life, The Human Faith Which Is Nothing But The Passive Acceptance Of Conventional Opinion.

We Live In A Society Whose Whole Policy Is To Excite Every Nerve In The Human Body And Keep It At The Highest Pitch Of Artificial Tension, To Strain Every Human Desire To The Limit And To Create As Many New Desires And Synthetic Passions As Possible, In Order To Cater To Them With The Products Of Our Factories And Printing Presses And Movie Studios And All The Rest.

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.

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

When Ambition Ends, Happiness Begins.

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.

We Do Not Exist For Ourselves.

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!

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.

The Question Of Love Is One That Cannot Be Evaded. Whether Or Not You Claim To Be Interested In It From The Moment You Are Alive You Are Bound To Be Concerned With Love Because Love Is Not Just Something That Happens To You: It Is A Certain Special Way Of Being Alive. Love Is In Fact An Intensification Of Life A Completeness A Fullness A Wholeness Of Life.

Every Moment And Every Event Of Every Man's Life On Earth Plants Something In His Soul.

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.

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?

Contradictions Have Always Existed In The Soul Of [individuals]. But It Is Only When We Prefer Analysis To Silence That They Become A Constant And Insoluble Problem. We Are Not Meant To Resolve All Contradictions But To Live With Them And Rise Above Them And See Them In The Light Of Exterior And Objective Values Which Make Them Trivial By Comparison.

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 Whole World Has Risen In Christ... If God Is 'all In All,' Then Everything Is In Fact Paradise, Because It Is Filled With The Glory And Presence Of God, And Nothing Is Any More Separated From God.

As Long As I Am Content To Know That He Is Infinitely Greater Than I, And That I Cannot Know Him Unless He Shows Himself To Me, I Will Have Peace, And He Will Be Near Me And In Me, And I Will Rest In Him.

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.

I Will Not Fear, For You Are Ever With Me And You Will Never Leave Me To Face My Perils Alone.

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.

A Bad Book About The Love Of God Remains A Bad Book.

True Happiness Is Not Found In Any Other Reward Than That Of Being United With God. If I Seek Some Other Reward Besides God Himself, I May Get My Reward But I Cannot Be Happy.

If We Wait For Some People To Become Agreeable Or Attractive Before We Begin To Love Them, We Will Never Begin. If We Are Content To Give Them A Cold Impersonal 'charity' That Is Merely A Matter Of Obligation, We Will Not Trouble To Understand Them Or To Sympathize With Them At All. And In That Case We Will Not Really Love Them, Because Love Implies An Efficacious Will Not Only To Do Good To Others Exteriorly But Also To Find Some Good In Them To Which We Can Respond."

His Justice Is The Love That Gives To Each One Of His Creatures The Gifts That His Mercy Has Previously Decreed. And His Mercy Is His Love, Doing Justice To Its Own Exigencies, And Renewing The Gift Which We Had Failed To Accept.

A Tree Gives Glory To God By Being A Tree. For In Being What God Means It To Be It Is Obeying Him.... The More A Tree Is Like Itself, The More It Is Like Him.

Souls Are Like Athletes, That Need Opponents Worthy Of Them, If They Are To Be Tried And Extended And Pushed To The Full Use Of Their Powers, And Rewarded According To Their Capacity.

God, Who Is Everywhere, Never Leaves Us. Yet He Seems Sometimes To Be Present, Sometimes To Be Absent. If We Do Not Know Him Well, We Do Not Realize That He May Be More Present To Us When He Is Absent Than When He Is Present.

Take More Time, Cover Less Ground.

We Cannot Possess The Truth Fully Until It Has Entered Into The Very Substance Of Our Life By Good Habits, And By A Certain Perfection Of Moral Activity.

A Man Can Radically Change His Life And Attain To A Deeper Meaning, A More Perfect Integration, A More Complete Fulfillment, A More Total Liberty Of Spirit Than Are Possible In The Routines Of A Purely Active Existence Centered On Money-making.

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.

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.

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.

Getting What You Want

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

Imagination Has The Creative Task Of Making Symbols, Joining Things Together In Such A Way That They Throw New Light On Each Other And On Everything Around Them. The Imagination Is A Discovering Faculty, A Faculty For Seeing Relationships, For Seeing Meanings That Are Special And Even Quite New.

... But Any Fool Knows That You Don't Need Money To Get Enjoyment Out Of Life.

We Love The Things We Pretend To Laugh At.

Then It Was As If I Suddenly Saw The Secret Beauty Of Their Hearts, The Depths Of Their Hearts Where Neither Sin Nor Desire Nor Self-knowledge Can Reach, The Core Of Their Reality, The Person That Each One Is In God's Eyes. If Only They Could See Themselves As They Really Are. If Only We Could See Each Other That Way All The Time, There Would Be No More War, No More Hatred, No More Cruelty, No More Greed . . . I Suppose The Big Problem Would Be That We Would Fall Down And Worship Each Other.

Love Is Its Own Reward.

Unconditional Love

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

In Louisville, At The Corner Of Fourth And Walnut, In The Center Of The Shopping District, I Was Suddenly Overwhelmed With The Realization That I Loved All Those People, That They Were Mine And I Theirs, That We Could Not Be Alien To One Another Even Though We Were Total Strangers.

One Has To Be Alone, Under The Sky, Before Everything Falls Into Place And One Finds His Or Her Own Place In The Midst Of It All. We Have To Have The Humility To Realize Ourselves As Part Of Nature.

A Superficial Freedom To Wander Aimlessly Here Or There, To Taste This Or That, To Make A Choice Of Distractions, Is Simply A Sham. It Claims To Be A Freedom Of "choice" When It Has Evaded The Basic Task Of Discovering Who It Is That Chooses.

It Is In Deep Solitude That I Find The Gentleness With Which I Can Truly Love My Brothers. The More Solitary I Am, The More Affection I Have For Them. It Is Pure Affection, And Filled With Reverance For The Solitude Of Others. Solitude And Silence Teach Me To Love My Brothers For What They Are, Not For What They Say.

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

For If I Am To Love Truly And Freely, I Must Be Able To Give Something That Is Truly My Own To Another. If My Heart Does Not First Belong To Me, How Can I Give It To Another?

Peace Demands The Most Heroic Labor And The Most Difficult Sacrifice. It Demands Greater Heroism Than War. It Demands Greater Fidelity To The Truth And A Much More Perfect Purity Of Conscience.

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.

We Assume That Others Are Receiving The Kind Of Appreciation We Want For Ourselves, And We Proceed On The Assumption That Since We Are Not Loveable As We Are, We Must Become Lovable Under False Pretenses, As If We Were Something Better Than We Are.

Each Particular Being, In Its Individuality, Its Concrete Nature And Entity, With All Its Own Characteristics And Its Private Qualities And Its Own Inviolable Identity, Gives Glory To God By Being Precisely What He Wants It To Be Here And Now, In The Circumstances Ordained For It By His Love And His Infinite Art.

Power Always Protects The Good Of Some At The Expense Of All Others.

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.

Because You Have Called Me Here Not To Wear A Label By Which I Can Recognize Myself And Place Myself In Some Kind Of A Category. You Do Not Want Me To Be Thinking About What I Am, But About What You Are. Or Rather, You Do Not Even Want Me To Be Thinking About Anything Much: For You Would Raise Me Above The Level Of Thought. And If I Am Always Trying To Figure Out What I Am And Where I Am And Why I Am, How Will That Work Be Done?

A Purely Mental Life May Be Destructive If It Leads Us To Substitute Thought For Life And Ideas For Actions. The Activity Proper To Man Is Purely Mental Because Man Is Not Just A Disembodied Mind. Our Destiny Is To Live Out What We Think, Because Unless We Live What We Know, We Do Not Even Know It. It Is Only By Making Our Knowledge Part Of Ourselves, Through Action, That We Enter Into The Reality That Is Signified By Our Concepts.

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

I Shall Lead You Through The Loneliness, The Solitude You Will Not Understand; But It Is My Shortcut To Your Soul.

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.

It Seems To Me That The Darkness That Has Troubled You ... Comes From One Very Serious Source. Without Wanting To Be In Conflict With The Truth And With The Will Of God, We Are Actually Going Against God's Will And His Teaching.

My God, I Pray Better To You By Breathing And Walking Than By Talking, Just As In Choir I Sing Best When I Am Thinking About Something Else, Or Better Still, Praying.

Stop Thinking And Start Looking.

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.

A Man Searching For Enlightenment Is Like A Man Sitting On An Ass In Search Of An Ass

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.

Those Who Think They 'know' From The Beginning Will Never In Fact Come To Know Anything.

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.

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.

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.

The Logic Of Worldly Success Rests On A Fallacy: The Strange Error That Our Perfection Depends On The Thoughts And Opinions And Applause Of Other Men! A Weird Life It Is, Indeed, To Be Living Always In Somebody Else's Imagination, As If That Were The Only Place In Which One Could At Last Become Real!

Art Enables Us To Find Ourselves And Lose Ourselves At The Same Time.

Finding Yourself

There Is No Greater Disaster In The Spiritual Life Than To Be Immersed In Unreality, For Life Is Maintained And Nourished In Us By Our Vital Relation With Realities Outside And Above Us.

May God Prevent Us From Becoming "right-thinking Men"-that Is To Say Men Who Agree Perfectly With Their Own Police.

Spread Abroad The Name Of Jesus In Humility And With A Meek Heart; Show Him Your Feebleness, And He Will Become Your Strength.

Infinite Sharing Is The Law Of God S Inner Life.

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.

A Man Knows When He Has Found His Vocation When He Stops Thinking About How To Live And Begins To Live.

Our Real Journey In Life Is Interior.

What Do I Mean By Loving Ourselves Properly? I Mean First Of All, Desiring To Live, Accepting Life As A Very Great Gift And A Great Good, Not Because Of What It Gives Us, But Because Of What It Enables Us To Give To Others.

To Some Men Peace Merely Means The Liberty To Exploit Other People Without Fear Of Retaliation Or Interference. To Others Peace Means The Freedom To Rob Others Without Interruption. To Still Others It Means The Leisure To Devour The Goods Of The Earth Without Being Compelled To Interrupt Their Pleasures To Feed Those Whom Their Greed Is Starving. And To Practically Everybody Peace Simply Means The Absence Of Any Physical Violence That Might Cast A Shadow Over Lives Devoted To The Satisfaction Of Their Animal Appetites For Comfort And Pleasure.

True Contemplation Is Not A Psychological Trick But A Theological Grace. It Can Come To Us Only As A Gift, And Not As A Result Of Our Own Clever Use Of Spiritual Techniques.

Love Is Perfect In Proportion To It's Freedom.

By My Monastic Life And Vows I Am Saying No To All The Concentration Camps, The Aerial Bombardments, The Staged Political Trials, The Judicial Murders, The Racial Injustices, The Economic Tyrannies, And The Whole Socioeconomic Apparatus Which Seems Geared For Nothing But Global Destruction In Spite Of All Its Fair Words In Favor Of Peace.

Perhaps Peace Is Not, After All, Something You Work For, Or 'fight For.' It Is Indeed 'fighting For Peace' That Starts All The Wars. What, After All, Are The Pretexts Of All These Cold War Crises, But 'fighting For Peace?' Peace Is Something You Have Or Do Not Have. If You Are Yourself At Peace, Then There Is At Least Some Peace In The World. Then Share Your Peace With Everyone, And Everyone Will Be At Peace.

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.

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.

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.

Teach Me To Take All Grace / And Spring It Into Blades Of Act, / Grow Spears And Sheaves Of Charity, / While Each New Instant, (new Eternity) / Flowering With Clean And Individual Circumstance, / Speaks Me The Whisper Of [god's] Consecrating Spirit. / Then Will Obedience Bring Forth New Incarnations / Shining To God With The Features Of [the Lord's] Christ.

Surrender Your Own Poverty And Acknowledge Your Nothingness To The Lord. Whether You Understand It Or Not, God Loves You, Is Present In You, Lives In You, Dwells In You, Calls You, Saves You And Offers You An Understanding And Compassion Which Are Like Nothing You Have Ever Found In A Book Or Heard In A Sermon.

You Pray Best When The Mirror Of Your Soul Is Empty Of Every Image Except The Image Of The Invisible Father.

We Have The Choice Of Two Identities: The External Mask Which Seems To Be Real...and The Hidden, Inner Person Who Seems To Us To Be Nothing, But Who Can Give Himself Eternally To The Truth In Whom He Subsists. (295)

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

I Will No Longer Wound Myself With The Thoughts And Questions That Have Surrounded Me Like Thorns: That Is A Penance You Do Not Ask Of Me.

For Me To Be A Saint Means To Be Myself.

Fear Narrows The Little Entrance Of Our Heart. It Shrinks Up Our Capacity To Love. It Freezes Up Our Power To Give Ourselves.

Capacity To Love

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

The Christian Life, And Especially The Contemplative Life, Is A Continual Discovery Of Christ In New And Unexpected Places.

Contemplative Life

We Cannot Master Everything, Taste Everything, Understand Everything, Drain Every Experience To Its Last Dregs. But If We Have The Courage To Let Almost Everything Else Go, We Will Probably Be Able To Retain The Thing Necessary For Us-whatever It May Be. If We Are Too Eager To Have Everything, We Will Almost Certainly Miss Even The One Thing We Need

You Cannot Be A Man Of Faith Unless You Know How To Doubt.

I Had Refused To Pay Any Attention To The Moral Laws Upon Which All Our Vitality And Sanity Depend: And So Now I Was Reduced To The Condition Of A Silly Old Woman, Worrying About A Lot Of Imaginary Rules Of Health, Standards Of Food-value, And A Thousand Minute Details Of Conduct That Were In Themselves Completely Ridiculous And Stupid, And Yet Which Haunted Me With Vague And Terrific Sanctions. If I Eat This, I May Go Out Of My Mind. If I Do Not Eat That, I May Die In The Night.

Love Winter When The Plant Says Nothing.

I Am Against War, Against Violence, Against Violent Revolution, For Peaceful Settlement Of Differences, For Nonviolent But Nevertheless Radical Changes. Change Is Needed, And Violence Will Not Really Change Anything: At Most It Will Only Transfer Power From One Set Of Bull-headed Authorities To Another.

Every Moment And Every Event Of Everyman's Life On Earth Plants Something In His Soul. For Just As The Wind Carries Thousands Of Winged Seeds, So Each Moment Brings With It Germs Of Spiritual Vitality That Come To Rest Imperceptibly In The Minds And Wills Of Men.

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.

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

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.

It Is Almost Impossible To Overestimate The Value Of True Humility And Its Power In The Spiritual Life. For The Beginning Of Humility Is The Beginning Of Blessedness And The Consummation Of Humility Is The Perfection Of All Joy. Humility Contains In Itself The Answer To All The Great Problems Of The Life Of The Soul. It Is The Only Key To Faith, With Which The Spiritual Life Begins: For Faith And Humility Are Inseparable. In Perfect Humility All Selfishness Disappears And Your Soul No Longer Lives For Itself Or In Itself For God: And It Is Lost And Submerged In Him And Transformed Into Him.

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

The Greatest Need Of Our Time Is To Clean Out The Enormous Mass Of Mental And Emotional Rubbish That Clutters Our Minds

I Am Beginning To Realize That "sanity" Is No Longer A Value Or An End In Itself. The "sanity" Of Modern Man Is About As Useful To Him As The Huge Bulk And Muscles Of The Dinosaur. If He Were A Little Less Sane, A Little More Doubtful, A Little More Aware Of His Absurdities And Contradictions, Perhaps There Might Be A Possibility Of His Survival.

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.

It Is The Will Of God That We Live Not Only As Rational Beings, But As "new Men" Regenerated By The Holy Spirit In Christ. It Is His Will That We Reach Out For Our Inheritance, That We Answer His Call To Be His Sons. We Are Born Men Without Our Consent, But The Consent To Be Sons Of God Has To Be Elicited By Our Own Free Will.

If You Have Love You Will Do All Things Well.

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

The Things We Really Need Come To Us Only As Gifts, And In Order To Receive Them As Gifts We Have To Be Open. In Order To Be Open We Have To Renounce Ourselves, In A Sense We Have To Die To Our Image Of Ourselves, Our Autonomy, Our Fixation Upon Our Self-willed Identity.

Love Not Only Prefers The Good Of Another To My Own, But It Does Not Even Compare The Two.

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.

The Selfishness Of An Age That Has Devoted Itself To The Mere Cult Of Pleasure Has Tainted The Whole Human Race With An Error That Makes All Our Acts More Or Less Lies Against God.

Many Poets Are Not Poets For The Same Reason That Many Religious Men Are Not Saints: They Never Succeed In Being Themselves. They Never Get Around To Being The Particular Poet Or The Particular Monk They Are Intended To Be By God. They Never Become The Man Or The Artist Who Is Called For By All The Circumstances Of Their Individual Lives. They Waste Their Years In Vain Efforts To Be Some Other Poet, Some Other Saint...they Wear Out Their Minds And Bodies In A Hopeless Endeavor To Have Somebody Else's Experiences Or Write Somebody Else's Poems.

The Truth Never Becomes Clear As Long As We Assume That Each One Of Us, Individually, Is The Center Of The Universe.

We Must Suffer. Our Five Sense Are Dulled By Inordinate Pleasure. Penance Makes Them Keen, Gives Them Back Their Natural Vitality, And More. Penance Clears The Eye Of Conscience And Of Reason. It Helps Think Clearly, Judge Sanely. It Strengthens The Action Of Our Will.

Hurry Ruins Saints As Well As Artists. They Want Quick Success, And They Are In Such A Hurry 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.

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

Wheels Of Fire, Cosmic, Rich, Full-bodied Honest Victories Over Desperation.

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.

It Is True That We Are Called To Create A Better World. But We Are First Of All Called To A More Immediate And Exalted Task: That Of Creating Our Own Lives.

Life Consists In Learning To Live On One's Own, Spontaneous, Freewheeling: To Do This One Must Recognize What Is One's Own-be Familiar And At Home With Oneself. This Means Basically Learning Who One Is, And Learning What One Has To Offer To The Contemporary World, And Then Learning How To Make That Offering Valid.

It Is True To Say That For Me Sanctity Consists In Being Myself And For You Sanctity Consists Of Being Yourself And That, In The Last Analysis, Your Sanctity Will Never Be Mine And Mine Will Never Be Yours, Except In The Communism Of Charity And Grace. For Me To Be A Saint Means To Be Myself. Therefore The Problem Of Sanctity And Salvation Is In Fact The Problem Of Finding Out Who I Am And Of Discovering My True Self.

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

Nonviolence Seeks To ‘win’ Not By Destroying Or Even By Humiliating The Adversary, But By Convincing [the Adversary] That There Is A Higher And More Certain Common Good Than Can Be Attained By Bombs And Blood. Nonviolence, Ideally Speaking, Does Not Try To Overcome The Adversary By Winning Over [them], But To Turn [them] From An Adversary Into A Collaborator By Winning [them] Over.

Jesus Lived And Died In Vain If He Did Not Teach Us To Regulate The Whole Of Life By The Eternal Law Of Love. Gandhi, Quoted In Merton, P. 38

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.

The Mission Of Christian Humility In Social Life Is Not Merely To Edify, But To Keep Minds Open To Many Alternatives. The Rigidity Of A Certain Type Of Christian Thought Has Seriously Impaired This Capacity, Which Nonviolence Must Recover.

Either You Look At The Universe As A Very Poor Creation Out Of Which No One Can Make Anything, Or You Look At Your Own Life And Your Own Part In The Universe As Infinitely Rich, Full Of Inexhaustible Interest, Opening Out Into The Infinite Further Responsibilities For Study And Contemplation And Interest And Praise. Beyond All And In All Is God.

Pardon All Runners, All Speechless, Alien Winds, All Mad Waters. Pardon Their Impulses, Their Wild Attitudes, Their Young Flights, Their Reticence. When A Message Has No Clothes On How Can It Be Spoken.

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

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

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.

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 Problem Today Is That There Are No Deserts, Only Dude Ranches.

People Have No Idea What One Saint Can Do: For Sanctity Is Stronger Than The Whole Of Hell.

Even The Darkest Moments Of The Liturgy Are Filled With Joy, And Ash Wednesday, The Beginning Of The Lenten Fast, Is A Day Of Happiness, A Christian Feast.

The Closer We Are To God, The Closer We Are To Those Who Are Close To Him.

Humble People Can Do Great Things With Uncommon Perfection Because They Are No Longer Concerned About Their Own Interests And Their Own Reputation, And Therefore They No Longer Need To Waste Their Efforts In Defending Them.

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

The Grateful Person Knows That God Is Good, Not By Hearsay But By Experience. And That Is What Makes All The Difference.

Some Of Us Need To Discover That We Will Not Begin To Live More Fully Until We Have The Courage To Do And See And Taste And Experience Much Less Than Usual... And For A Man Who Has Let Himself Be Drawn Completely Out Of Himself By His Activity, Nothing Is More Difficult Than To Sit Still And Rest, Doing Nothing At All. The Very Act Of Resting Is The Hardest And Most Courageous Act He Can Perform.

The End Of The World Will Be Legal.

End Of The World

If We Examine Ourselves Carefully We Shall See Most Of Us Have An Enormous Amount Of Unfinished Business...we Have To Be Free So That We Can Just Step Across The Line And That's It. That Is What Real Freedom Is.

Unfinished Business

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.

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

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

Show Us Your Christ, Lady, After This Our Exile, Yes: But Show Him To Us Also Now, Show Him To Us Here, While We Are Still Wanderers.

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.

The Gate Of Heaven Is Everywhere.

Gates Of Heaven

It Is In The Ordinary Duties And Labors Of Life That The Christian Can And Should Develop His Spiritual Union With God.

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. The One Who Does Most To Avoid Suffering Is, In The End, The One Who Suffers Most.

Insignificant Things

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

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

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.

Love In Fact Is The Spiritual Life, And Without It All The Other Exercises Of The Spirit, However Lofty, Are Emptied Of Content And Become Mere Illusions.

Technology Is Not In Itself Opposed To Spirituality And To Religion. But It Presents A Great Temptation.

This Is The Greatest Stumbling Block In Our Spiritual Discipline, Which, In Actuality, Consists Not In Getting Rid Of The Self But In Realizing The Fact That There Is No Such Existence From The First.

A Life That Is Without Problems May Literally Be More Hopeless, Than One That Always Verges On Despair.

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.

Our Christian Destiny Is, In Fact, A Great One: But We Cannot Achieve Greatness Unless We Lose All Interest In Being Great. For Our Own Idea Of Greatness Is Illusory, And If We Pay Too Much Attention To It We Will Be Lured Out Of The Peace And Stability Of The Being God Gave Us, And Seek To Live In A Myth We Have Created For Ourselves. And When We Are Truly Ourselves We Lose Most Of The Futile Self-consciousness That Keeps Us Constantly Comparing Ourselves With Others In Order To See How Big We Are.

The Root Of War Is Fear.

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.

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.

It Might Be Good To Open Our Eyes And See.

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.

One Of The First Things To Learn If You Want To Be A Contemplative Is To Mind Your Own Business. Nothing Is More Suspicious, In A Man Who Seems Holy, Than An Impatient Desire To Reform Other Men.

Mind Your Own Business

As Long As We Are On Earth, The Love That Unites Us Will Bring Us Suffering By Our Very Contact With One Another, Because This Love Is The Resetting Of A Body Of Broken Bones. Even Saints Cannot Live With Saints On This Earth Without Some Anguish. There Are Two Things Which Men Can Do About The Pain Of Disunion With Other Men. They Can Love Or They Can Hate.

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

The Primordial Blessing, 'increase And Multiply', Has Suddenly Become A Hemorrhage Of Terror. We Are Numbered In Billions, And Massed Together, Marshalled, Numbered, Marched Here And There, Taxed, Drilled, Armed, Worked To The Point Of Insensibility, Dazed By Information, Drugged By Entertainment, Surfeited With Everything, Nauseated With The Human Race And With Ourselves, Nauseated With Life.

Let Me Rest In Your Will And Be Silent. Then The Light Of Your Joy Will Warm My Life. Its Fire Will Burn In My Heart And Shine For Your Glory. This Is What I Live For. Amen, Amen.

For Our Duties And Our Needs, In All The Fundamental Things For Which We Were Created, Come Down In Practice To The Same Thing.

To Be A Saint Is To Be Yourself.

We Are Not Perfectly Free Until We Live In Pure Hope. For When Our Hope Is Pure, It No Longer Trusts Exclusively In Human And Visible Means, Nor Rests In Any Visible End. He Who Hopes In God Trusts God, Whom He Never Sees, To Bring Him To The Possession Of Things That Are Beyond Imagination.

Man Was Made For The Highest Activity, Which Is, In Fact, His Rest.

The Illusion That Mechanical Progress Means Human Improvement ... Alienates Us From Our Own Being And Our Own Reality. It Is Precisely Because We Are Convinced That Our Life, As Such, Is Better If We Have A Better Car, A Better Tv Set, Better Toothpaste, Etc., That We Condemn And Destroy Our Own Reality And The Reality Of Our Natural Resources. Technology Was Made For Man, Not Man For Technology. In Losing Touch With Being And Thus With God, We Have Fallen Into A Senseless Idolatry Of Production And Consumption For Their Own Sakes.

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.

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

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.

World Suffering

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.

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.

Humility Is The Surest Sign Of Strength.

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.

Prayer And Love Are Really Learned In The Hour When Prayer Becomes Impossible And Your Heart Turns To Stone.

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

The Man Who Fears To Be Alone Will Never Be Anything But Lonely, No Matter How Much He May Surround Himself With People. But The Man Who Learns, In Solitude And Recollection, To Be At Peace With His Own Loneliness, And To Prefer Its Reality To The Illusion Of Merely Natural Companionship, Comes To Know The Invisible Companionship Of God. Such A One Is Alone With God In All Places, And He Alone Truly Enjoys The Companionship Of Other Men, Because He Loves Them In God In Whom Their Presence Is Not Tiresome, And Because Of Whom His Own Love For Them Can Never Know Satiety.

The Psychological Impotence Of Our Enraged Generation Must Be Traced To The Overwhelming Accusation Of Insincerity Which Every Man And Woman Has To Confront, In The Depths Of His Own Soul, When He Seeks To Love Merely For His Own Pleasure.and Yet The Men Of Our Time Do Not Love With Enough Courage To Risk Even Discomfort Or Inconvenience.

To Enter Into The Realm Of Contemplation One Must In A Certain Sense Die: But This Death Is In Fact The Entrance To A Higher Life. It Is A Death For The Sake Of Life, Which Leaves Behind All That We Can Know Or Treasure As Life, As Thought, As Experience, As Joy, As Being.

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

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

Be Still: There Is No Longer Any Need Of Comment. It Was A Lucky Wind That Blew Away His Halo With His Cares, A Lucky Sea That Drowned His Reputation.

It Is A Glorious Destiny To Be A Member Of The Human Race, Now I Realize What We All Are . If Only They [people] Could All See Themselves As They Really Are I Suppose The Big Problem Would Be That We Would Fall Down And Worship Each Other At The Center Of Our Being Is A Point Of Nothingness Which Is Untouched By Sin And By Illusions, A Point Of Pure Truth This Little Point Is The Pure Glory Of God In Us. It Is In Everybody.

It Is When We Love The Other, The Enemy, That We Obtain From God The Key To An Understanding Of Who He Is, And Who We Are.

Faith Is The Door To The Full Inner Life Of The Church, A Life Which Includes Not Only Access To An Authoritative Teaching But Above All To A Deep Personal Experience Which Is At Once Unique And Yet Shared By The Whole Body Of Christ, In The Spirit Of Christ.

How Deluded We Sometimes Are By The Clear Notions We Get Out Of Books. They Make Us Think That We Really Understand Things Of Which We Have No Practical Knowledge At All.

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.

The Land Which Thou Goest To Possess Is Not Like The Land Of Egypt From Whence Thou Camest Out... For My Thoughts Are Not Your Thoughts, Nor Your Ways My Ways, Saith The Lord...seek The Lord While He May Be Found, Call Upon Him While He Is Near...why Do You Spend Money For That Which Is Not Bread And Your Labor For That Which Doth Not Satisfy You?

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