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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

-Thomas Merton

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We Cannot Master Everything,

Thomas Merton

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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

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And It Is In This Darkness, When There Is Nothing Left In Us That Can Please Or Comfort Our Own Minds, When We Seem To Be Useless And Worthy Of All Contempt, When We Seem To Have Failed, When We Seem To Be Destroyed And Devoured, It Is Then That The Deep And Secret Selfishness That Is Too Close To Us For Us To Identify Is Stripped Away From Our Souls. It Is In This Darkness That We Find Liberty. It Is In This Abandonment That We Are Made Strong. This Is The Night Which Empties Us And Makes Us Pure.

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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.

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Music And Art And Poetry Attune The Soul To God.

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Charity Is Without Fear: Having Given All That It Has, It Has Nothing Left To Lose.

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Each Individual Christian And Each New Age Of The Church Has To Make This Rediscovery, This Return To The Source Of Christian Life.

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

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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

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.

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To Be A Saint Is To Be Yourself.

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

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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 Real Hope Is Not In Something We Think We Can Do, But In God, Who Is Making Something Good Out Of It In Some Way We Cannot See.

We Become Contemplatives When God Discovers Himself In Us.

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.

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.

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A Faith That Is Afraid Of Other People Is No Faith At All.

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

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 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?

To Be Grateful Is To Recognize The Love Of God In Everything.

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.

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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?

I Have Only One Desire, And That Is The Desire For Solitude-to Disappear Into God, To Be Submerged In His Peace, To Be Lost In The Secret Of His Face.

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.

To Those Who Have No Personal Experience Of This Revolutionary Aspect Of Christian Truth, But Who See Only The Outer Crust Of Dead, Human Conservatism That Tends To Form Around The Church The Way Barnacles Gather On The Hull Of A Ship, All This Talk About Dynamism Sounds Foolish.

I Have Learned That One Cannot Truly Know Hope Unless He Has Found Out How Like Despair Hope Is.

Solitude And Silence Teach Me To Love My Brothers For What They Are, Not For What They Say.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

A Man Who Fails Well Is Greater Than One Who Succeeds Badly.

I Can Only Become Perfectly Free By Serving The Will Of God.

I Am Willing To Admit That Some People Might Live There For Years, Or Even A Lifetime, So Protected That They Never Sense The Sweet Stench Of Corruption That Is All Around Them - The Keen, Thin Scent Of Decay That Pervades Everything And Accuses With A Terrible Accusation The Superficial Youthfulness, The Abounding Undergraduate Noise, That Fills Those Ancient Buildings.

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.

God Has Left Sin In The World In Order That There May Be Forgiveness: Not Only The Secret Forgiveness By Which He Himself Cleanses Our Souls, But The Manifest Forgiveness By Which We Have Mercy On One Another And So Give Expression To The Fact That He Is Living, By His Mercy, In Our Own Hearts.

Nothing Has Ever Been Said About God That Hasn't Already Been Said Better By The Wind In The Pine Trees.

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.

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.

Prayer Is Not So Much A Way To Find God As A Way Of Resting In Him...who Loves Us, Who Is Near To Us.

God Must Be Allowed The Right To Speak Unpredictably.... We Must Find Him In Our Enemy, Or We May Lose Him Even In Our Friend. We Must Find Him In The Pagan Or We Will Lose Him In Our Own Selves, Substituting For His Living Presence An Empty Abstraction.

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.

I Suppose What Makes Me Most Glad Is That We All Recognize Each Other In This Metaphysical Space Of Silence And Happening, And Get Some Sense, For A Moment, That We Are Full Of Paradise Without Knowing It.

To Love Our Nothingness We Must Love Everything In Us That The Proud Man Loves When He Loves Himself. But We Must Love It All For Exactly The Opposite Reason.

If We Have Not Silence, God Is Not Heard In Our Music. If We Have No Rest God, Does Not Bless Our Work.

They Were In The World And Not Of It--not Because They Were Saints, But In A Different Way: Because They Were Artists. The Integrity Of An Artist Lifts A Man Above The Level Of The World Without Delivering Him From It.

The Whole Function Of The Life Of Prayer Is, Then, To Enlighten And Strengthen Our Conscience So That It Not Only Knows And Perceives The Outward, Written Precepts Of The Moral And Divine Laws, But Above All Lives God's Law In Concrete Reality By Perfect And Continual Union With His Will.

Are They Moved By A Sense Of Human Need For Silence, For Reflection, For Inner Seeking? So They Want To Get Away From The Noise And Tension Of Modern Life, At Least For A Little While, In Order To Relax Their Minds And Wills And Seek A Blessed Healing Sense Of Inner Unity, Reconciliation, Integration?

It Is Not Merely Our Own Desire But The Desire Of Christ In His Spirit That Drives Us To Grow In Love. Those Who Seldom Or Never Feel In Their Hearts The Desire For The Love Of God And Other Men, And Who Do Not Thirst For The Pure Waters Of Desire Which Are Poured Out In Us By The Strong, Living God, Are Usually Those Who Have Drunk From Other Rivers Or Have Dug For Themselves Broken Cisterns.

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.

This Is The Crucifixion Of Christ: In Which He Dies Again And Again In The Individuals Who Were Made To Share The Joy And Freedom Of His Grace, And Who Deny Him.

Crucifixion Of Christ

My Best Writing Has Always Been In Journals.

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.

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 Biggest Disease In North America Is Busyness.

A Gentle Sense Of Humor Will Be Alert To Detect Anything That Savors Of A Pious 'act' On The Part Of The Penitent.

The Only Influence That Can Really Upset The Injustice And Iniquity Of Men Is The Power That Breathes In The Christian Tradition, Renewing Our Participation In The Life That Is The Light Of Men.

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.

I Myself Am Part Of The Weather And Part Of The Climate And Part Of The Place … It Is Certainly Part Of My Life Of Prayer.

Modern Man Believes He Is Fruitful And Productive When His Ego Is Aggressively Affirmed, When He Is Visibly Active, And When His Action Produces Obvious Results.

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.

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

Thinking About Monastic Ideals Is Not The Same As Living Up To Them, But At Any Rate Such Thinking Has An Important Place In A Monk's Life, Because You Cannot Begin To Do Anything Unless You Have Some Idea What You Are Trying To Do.

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.

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

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

Zen Insight Is Not Our Awareness, But Being's Awareness Of Itself In Us.

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".

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

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

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.

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.

My Life Is ... A Mystery Which I Do Not Attempt To Really Understand, As Though 1 Were Led By The Hand In A Night Where I See Nothing, But Can Fully Depend On The Love And Protection Of Him Who Guides Me.

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

It Is Not Only Our Hatred Of Others That Is Dangerous But Also And Above All Our Hatred Of Ourselves: Particularly That Hatred Of Ourselves Which Is Too Deep And Too Powerful To Be Consciously Faced. For It Is This Which Makes Us See Our Own Evil In Others And Unable To See It In Ourselves.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Ours Is A Time Of Anxiety Because We Have Willed It To Be So. Our Anxiety Is Not Imposed On Us By Force From Outside. We Impose It On Our World And Upon One Another From Within Ourselves.

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

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.

Thinking Prevents The Unconscious From Speaking.

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.

In Any Case, His Religious Teaching Consisted Mostly In More Or Less Vague Ethical Remarks, An Obscure Mixture Of Ideals Of English Gentlemanliness And His Favorite Notions Of Personal Hygiene. Everybody Knew That His Class Was Liable To Degenerate Into A Demonstration Of Some Practical Points About Rowing, With Buggy Sitting On The Table And Showing Us How To Pull An Oar.

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.

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.

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.

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

We Know When We Are Following Our Vocation When Our Soul Is Set Free From Preoccupation With Itself And Is Able To Seek God And Even To Find Him, Even Though It May Not Appear To Find Him. Gratitude And Confidence And Freedom From Ourselves: These Are Signs That We Have Found Our Vocation And Are Living Up To It Even Though Everything Else May Seem To Have Gone Wrong. They Give Us Peace In Any Suffering. They Teach Us To Laugh At Despair. And We May Have To.

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