If you have never had any distractions you don’t know how to pray.
To become attached to the experience of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love.
You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer.
For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one’s own contingent self, cannot exist where there is no contingent self to which anything can be attributed.
The logic of the poet – that is, the logic of language or the experience itself – develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.
We cannot possess the truth fully until it has entered into the very substance of our life by good habits, and by a certain perfection of moral activity.
That is God’s call to us – simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.
To hope is to risk frustration. Make up your mind to risk frustration.
You are certainly one of the joys of life for all who have ever come within a mile of you.
The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to him.
Spread abroad the name of Jesus in humility and with a meek heart; show him your feebleness, and he will become your strength.
It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not what he ought to be. If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we do away with him altogether.
O God, my God, the night has values that the day never dreamed of.
In a world of noise, confusion and conflict it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace. In such places love can blossom.
To be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.
No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.
Humility is the surest sign of strength.
Love is a special way of being alive.
There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics.
The biggest disease in North America is busyness.