If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.
But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.
Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.
The gate of heaven is everywhere.
It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are.
How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man’s city?
In the end, it’s the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.
A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair.
Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.
Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.
Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.
One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us.
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.