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"To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell."
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"Joblessness does not necessarily mean idleness."

"If you want to know the value of a second, ask the person who just crossed the road at the wrong time and barely escaped being hit by a speeding car."

"To have wealth does not mean you love money, you can love money and not even have a cent."

"Three weeks ago, he'd seen hail fall from the sky, onlyto be followed minutes later by a spectacular rainbow that seemed to frame the azalea bushes. The colors, so vivid they seemed almost alive, made him think that nature sometimes sends us signs, that it's important to remember that joy can always follow despair. But a moment later, the rainbow had vanished and the hail returned, and he realized that joy was sometimes only an illusion."

"I can only see life as this most miserable accident that I have been forced to endure simply because I refuse to see it as the most astounding plan that I have been privileged to engage."

"Life is more valuable than money."

"The poorest people sometimes have the richest minds."

"Life becomes perfect if I look at it through my imperfect perceptions."

"It is not very important where you are, but where your thoughts are taking you is important."

"If the journey to success and happiness was hundred miles, some people would calculate it by meters and get discouraged by the numbers they come up with."
Explore more quotes by Thomas Merton


"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."


"October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful."


"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."


"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."


"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."


"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."


"When men live huddled together without true communication, there seems to be a greater sharing, and a more genuine communion. But this is not communion, only immersion in the general meaninglessness of countless slogans and clichés repeated over and over again so that in the end one listens without hearing and responds without thinking. The constant din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true communion almost impossible..."


"All theology is a kind of birthday. Each one who is born Comes into the world as a question For which old answers Are not sufficient."
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