Love and Living Quotes

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Love and Living Love and Living by Thomas Merton
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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.”
Thomas Merton, Love and Living
“If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success . . . If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.”
Thomas Merton, Love and Living
“The point where you become free not to kill, not to exploit, not to destroy, not to compete, because you are no longer afraid of death or the devil or poverty or failure. If you discover this nakedness, you’d better keep it private. People don’t like it.”
Thomas Merton, Love and Living
“The most obvious fact about war today is that while everyone claims to hate it, and all are unanimously agreed that it is our greatest single evil, there is little significant resistance to it except on the part of small minorities who, by the very fact of their protest, are dismissed as eccentric...War represents a vice that mankind would like to get rid of but which it cannot do without. Man is like an alcoholic who knowns that drink will destroy him but who always has a reason for drinking. So with war. And the best, most obvious, most incontrovertible reason for war is of course "peace."... It should be clear from this that war is, in fact, totally irrational, and that it proceeds to its violent ritual with the chanting of perfect nonsense. Yet men not only accept this, they even go so far as to sacrifice their lives and their human dignity and to commit the most hideous atrocities, convinced that in so doing they are being noble, honest, self-sacrificing, and just.”
Thomas Merton, Love and Living