"In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from  dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation... This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud."
— Thomas Merton, Anglo-American Catholic mystic, born January 31, 1915