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" 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. "
Thomas Merton
Body
Me
My Own
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" 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. "
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" Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul. "
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" I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery. "
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" The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom. "
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" 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. "
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" 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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" Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another. "
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" We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us. "
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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. "
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" Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments. "
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" Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how. "
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" Perhaps I am stronger than I think. "
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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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" Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony. "
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" 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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" 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. "
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" When ambition ends, happiness begins. "
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" On the last day of January 1915, in the second year of the Great War, down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into this world. "
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" Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. "
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" 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. "
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" The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me. "
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" The tighter you squeeze, the less you have. "
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" 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. "
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" We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves. "
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" If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell. "
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" Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real. "
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" 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. "
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" Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation. "
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" We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness. "
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" 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. "
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