Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life.
I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.
The only influence that can really upset the injustice and iniquity of men is the power that breathes in the Christian tradition, renewing our participation in the Life that is the Light of men.
A humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact, he is not afraid of anything, even himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God.
Love, in fact, is the spiritual life; and without it, all other exercises of the spirit are emptied of content.
If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest, God does not bless our work.
O love-why can’t you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven’s sake, don’t.
Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand.
The humble person receives praise the way a clean window takes the light of the sun. The truer and more intense the light is, the less you see of the glass.
Love is not a mere emotion or sentiment. It is the lucid and ardent responses of the whole person to a value that is revealed to him as perfect.
How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all.
Our real journey in life is interior.
There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.
Stop thinking and start looking.
Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
The Hindus are not looking for us to send them men who will build schools and hospitals, although those things are good and useful in themselves – and perhaps very badly needed in India: they want to know if we have any saints to send them.
True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.
The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive of perception.
If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him.
I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to.