There is no salvation outside the church.
The most venerable, clearly understood, enlightened, and reliable constant in the world is not only that we want to be happy, but that we want only to be so. Our very nature requires it of us.
What can be more excellent than prayer; what is more profitable to our life; what sweeter to our souls; what more sublime, in the course of our whole life, than the practice of prayer!
There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.
Really great things, when discussed by little men, can usually make such men grow big.
Sin is Energy in the wrong channel.
Only He who made man makes man happy.
We speak, but it is God who teaches.
You called and shouted and burst my deafness. You flashed, shone, and scattered my blindness. You breathed odors, and I drew in breath and panted for You. I tasted, and I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burned for Your peace.
How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.
Sin is looking for the right thing in the wrong place.
It’s not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds.
God grants us not always what we ask so as to bestow something preferable.
This world’s a bubble.
The honors of this world, what are they but puff, and emptiness, and peril of falling?
If I am given a formula, and I am ignorant of its meaning, it cannot teach me anything, but if I already know it what does the formula teach me?
Thou must be emptied of that wherewith thou art full, that thou mayest be filled with that whereof thou art empty.
The sole purpose of life is to gain merit for life in eternity.
What I needed most was to love and to be loved, eager to be caught. Happily I wrapped those painful bonds around me; and sure enough, I would be lashed with the red-hot pokers or jealousy, by suspicions and fear, by burst of anger and quarrels.
Custom is second nature.