We are not converted only once in our lives but many times and this endless series of conversions and inner revolutions leads to our transformation.
The God of peace is never glorified by human violence.
It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.
Before we can become who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person who we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.
We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us.
In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for ‘finding himself.’ If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer.
Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.
Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost.
One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.
Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
We do not exist for ourselves.
Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally.
Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.
Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision – the only decision that matters.
One has to be alone, under the sky, Before everything falls into place and one finds his or her own place in the midst of it all. We have to have the humility to realize ourselves as part of nature.
A faith that is afraid of other people is not faith at all.
The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer.
Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.