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If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me ...more

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First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. W...more

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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 lo...more

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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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The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and...more

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We are what we love. If we love God, in whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in him and we cannot help being happy: we have already achi...more

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In other words, I have tried to learn in my writing a monastic lesson I could probably not have learned otherwise: to let go of my idea of myself, to ...more

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Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38

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For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.

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Our Christian destiny is, in fact, a great one: but we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. For our own idea of greatn...more

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The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving th...more

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It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.

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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 pe...more

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Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fr...more

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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 ...more