God, Who is everywhere, never leaves us. Yet He seems sometimes to be present, sometimes to be absent. If we do not know Him well, we do not realize that He may be more present to us when He is absent than when He is present.
The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places.
In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question.
If we seek paradise outside ourselves, we cannot have paradise in our hearts.
What we have to be is what we are.
We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to “like” one another.
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?
The grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.
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.