What does it mean to know and experience my own “nothingness?” It is not enough to turn away in disgust from my illusions and faults and mistakes, to separate myself from them as if they were not, and as if I were someone other than myself. This kind of self-annihilati on is only a worse illusion, it is a pretended humility which, by saying “I am nothing” I mean in effect “I wish I were not what I am. ✨ Thomas Merton (2011). Thoughts In Solitude, p.49, Macmillan
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- In the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong. ✨ Thomas Merton (2007). New Seeds of Contemplation, p.96, New Directions P … ▶
- Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk … ▶
- The things I thought were so important -- because of the effort I put into them -- have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to … ▶
- But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God's love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to … ▶
- What we have to be is what we are. ✨ Thomas Merton (1975). The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, p.308, New Directions Publishing
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