Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it.
To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason.
For although God is right with us and in us and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find him.
There should be at least a room or some corner where no one will find you and disturb you or notice you.
Because of their enmity you will be left alone. They will cast you out and forsake you.
The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.
To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions.
But precisely this illusion that everything is “clear” is what is blinding us all. It is a serious temptation, and it is a subtle form of pride and worldly love of power and revenge.
To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God.
The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself.
There is a subtle but inescapable connection between the “sacred” attitude and the acceptance of one’s in most self.
God Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true self.
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.
You are certainly one of the joys of life for all who have ever come within a mile of you.