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"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."
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"He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people… I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them—a comfortable prison of his own design."
"You say this as if you envied him."
"There are worse prisons than words."

"I don't need a personal trainer, I need someone to stalk me and threaten to kick my ass when I eat and drink stuff I'm not supposed to!"

"I had never been a dresser. My shirts were all faded and shrunken, 5 or 6 years old, threadbare. My pants the same. I hated department stores, I hated the clerks, they acted so superior, they seemed to know the secret of life, they had a confidence I didn't possess. My shoes were always broken down and old, I disliked shoe stores too. I never purchased anything until it was completely unusable, and that included automobiles. It wasn't a matter of thrift, I just couldn't bear to be a buyer needing a seller, seller being so handsome and aloof and superior. Besides, it all took time, time when you could just be laying around and drinking."

"She's a gypsy girl living in a materialistic world, Unattached to most things but in love with life itself."

"Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste."

"An indoor man eats nothing, except that which is prepared and served by his mother with lots of insults, an outdoor man eats that which he buys, prepares, served and eaten with lots of respect."

"When something needs to be ironed I put it in the ironing basket. If a year goes by and the item is still in the basket I throw the item away. This is a good system since eventually I end up only with clothes that don't need ironing."
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."


"We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us."


"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."


"Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments."


"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."


"We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others."
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