I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me.
Action is the stream, and contemplation is the spring.
We are already ONE. We just think we are separate.
We cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great.
Love not only prefers the good of another to my own, but it does not even compare the two.
There were only a few shepherds at the first Bethlehem. The ox and the donkey understood more of the first Christmas than the high priests in Jerusalem. And it is the same today.
Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.
We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of others and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us.
In an age where there is much talk about “being yourself,” I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else.
It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes.
The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
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.
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.