“We must be our own before we can be another's.”

“We must be silent before we can listen. We must listen before we can learn. We must learn before we can prepare. We must prepare before we can serve. We must serve before we can lead.”

“Nothing out there tells us how we must live: we and we alone can now with confidence knowingly trust our own hearts, and admit that we do and must invent our own ethics.”

“Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.”

“The immature conscience is not its own master. It simply parrots the decisions of others. It does not make judgments of its own; it merely conforms to the judgments of others. That is not real freedom, and it makes true love impossible, for if we are to love truly and freely, we must be able to give something that is truly our own to another. If our heart does not belong to us, asks Merton, how can we give it to another?”

“we must follow our own path, and sometimes that path can be laden with bumps and curves and rivers to cross. but we cannot block the paths of our neighbors, for that is not our place. we can only seek to groom and shape our own.”