Thomas Merton

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."

"Attachment to spiritual things is... just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else."

"Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ."

"Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life."

"Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how."

"Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another."

"Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience."

"Perhaps I am stronger than I think."

"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them."

"The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom."

"We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others."

"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."