The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more that you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.

Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton

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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.

— Thomas Merton

It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God.

— Thomas Merton

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

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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.

— Thomas Merton

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell

— Thomas Merton