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Thomas Merton Quotes

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"What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous..."

"We do not exist for ourselves..."

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

"The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me."

"Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it."

"Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ."

"A daydream is an evasion."

"Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation."

"An author in a Trappist monastery is like a duck in a chicken coop. And he would give anything in the world to be a chicken instead of a duck."

"By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet."
Nature

"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."

"Men in bowlers and dark suits with their rolled-up umbrellas. Men full of propriety, calm and proud, neat and noble."

"The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little."

"There was this shadow, this double, this writer who had followed me into the cloister. He rides my shoulders I cannot lose him."

"The tighter you squeeze, the less you have."

"When ambition ends, happiness begins."

"What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous."

"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."

"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."

"The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error."

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