Contemplation is the loving sense of this life, this presence and this eternity.
What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?
Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast.
There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.
We must slow down to a human tempo and we’ll begin to have time to listen.
It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.
People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.
The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.
If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.
The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear.
Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are.
Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.
To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair.
I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves.
The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living.
The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.
We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it.
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.
On Pride: This sickness is most dangerous when it succeeds in looking like humility. When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless.