“A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.  No man can serve two masters.  Your life is shaped by the end you live for.  You are made in the image of what you desire.”  Thomas Merton

“The words of truth are always paradoxical.  To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.”  Lao Tzu

“The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.”  Thomas Merton

“But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to the question.”  Thomas Merton

“The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.”  Arthur Schopenhauer

“We cannot live only for ourselves.  A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”  Herman Melville

“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.”  Thomas Merton

“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.  That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business.  What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.”  Thomas Merton

“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.”  Thomas Merton

“Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time.”  Thomas Merton