Emptiness Quote by Thomas Merton

“Prayer is an expression of who we are...We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.”

Thomas Merton

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Emptiness Expression Fulfillment Gaps Incompleteness Life Prayer Who we are

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“Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of…

Thomas Merton

If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence. Since God cannot be imagined, anything our imagination tells…

Thomas Merton

It is almost impossible to overestimate the value of true humility and its power in the spiritual life. For the beginning of humility is the beginning of blessedness and the consummation of humility is the perfection of all joy. Humility contains in itself the answer to all the great problems of the life of the soul. It is the only…

Thomas Merton

We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human…

Thomas Merton

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The desire to kill is like the desire to attack another with an ingot of red -hot iron: I have to pick up the…

Thomas Merton

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To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a…

Thomas Merton

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The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of…

Thomas Merton

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Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in…

Thomas Merton

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Things that are good are good, and if one is responding to that goodness one is in contact with a truth from which one…

Thomas Merton

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Love winter when the plant says nothing.

Thomas Merton

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The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of…

Thomas Merton

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“The wisdom of the flesh is a judgement that the ordinary ends of our natural appetites are the goods to which the whole of…

Thomas Merton

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More Emptiness quotes

Tell the truth about your wound, and then you will get a truthful picture of the remedy to apply to it. Don't pack whatever…

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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Go into emptiness, strike voids, bypass what he defends hit him where he does not expect you.

Sun Tzu

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I've always been a very restless person. I work hard, spend too much time looking after my son, I dance like a mad thing, I learned calligraphy. I go to courses on selling, I read one book after another. But that's all a way of avoiding those moments when nothing is happening, because those blank spaces give me a feeling…

Paulo Coelho

“I've decided that has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact…

Alan Lightman

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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than…

Milan Kundera

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Buddhist words such as compassion and emptiness don't mean much until we start cultivating our innate ability simply to be there with pain with an open heart and the willingness not to instantly try to get ground under our feet. For instance, if what we're feeling is rage, we usually assume that there are only two ways to relate to…

Pema Chodron

What I was trying to convey there was the kind of waste land that was left after the war. It was a bit like…

George Martin

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“Everything we perceive to be solid and static is made up of almost entirely empty space.”

Joseph P. Kauffman

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But what was there to say? Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it…

Arundhati Roy