“Ask me not where I live or what I like to eat… Ask me what I am living for and what I think is keeping me from living fully that.”
Source: Thoughts in Solitude
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Thomas Merton 92
Priest and author 1915–1968Related quotes

As quoted in Writers on Writing (1986) by Jon Winokur.
Variant: If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.

2000s, Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation (2001)
Context: !-- I was getting 8 to 10 orders [for tapes of Emacs] a month. And, if necessary, I could have lived on just that, because --> I've always lived cheaply. I live like a student, basically. And I like that, because it means that money is not telling me what to do. I can do what I think is important for me to do. It freed me to do what seemed worth doing. So make a real effort to avoid getting sucked into all the expensive lifestyle habits of typical Americans. Because if you do that, then people with the money will dictate what you do with your life. You won't be able to do what's really important to you.<!-- line 422

“I do not live for what the world thinks of me, but for what I think of myself.”
Letter to Charles Warren Stoddard (21 August 1903)

There are many other options of organization for the future than those typically discussed today... In order to accomplish this task one must be free of bias and nationalism, and reflect those qualities in the design of policies. How would you approach that? This is a difficult project requiring input from many disciplines.
Source: Designing the Future (2007), p. 6-7

“I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“What I know is that I can trust his eyes because what lives in them, lives in me.”
page 108
A Million Little Pieces (2003)