You wake from dreams of doom and – for a moment – you know: beyond all the noise and the gestures, the only real thing, love’s calm unwavering flame in the half-light of an early dawn.
Time always seems long to the child who is waiting – for Christmas, for next summer, for becoming a grownup: long also when he surrenders his whole soul to each moment of a happy day.
Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.
Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.
There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life’s point of no return.
Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.
Here man is no longer the center of the world, only a witness, but a witness who is also a partner in the silent life of Nature, bound by secret affinities of the trees.
Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.
Each morning we must hold out the chalice of our being to receive, to carry, and give back. It must be held out empty – for the past must only be reflected in its polish, its shape, its capacity.
Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or convictions.
Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road.
Everything will be all right – you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.
Friendship needs no words.
In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.
Life only demands from you the strength that you possess. Only one feat is possible; not to run away.
God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.
If only I may grow: firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer.
Do not look back and do not dream about the future. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward, your destiny, is in the present moment.
The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others.
Only one feat is possible: not to have run away.