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It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as God's will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe you—try to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as God's will yourself!

— Thomas Merton Seeds of Contemplation (1949)

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More quotes by Thomas Merton

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This new language of prayer has to come out of something which transcends all our traditions, and comes out of the immediacy of love.

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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)

It is better to be poor and walk in integrity than to be stupid and speak lies.

Solomon

If a poor person envies a rich person, he is no better than the rich person.

Leo Tolstoy

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

Emil Cioran The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Merton (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.