If we do not respond to human affection we cannot be loved by God in the way in which He has willed to love us – with the Heart of the Man, Jesus Who is God, the Son of God, and the anointed Christ.
You can now find the most ardent Christians lined up in the most ridiculous, regressive, irrational parades. If they were concerned only with flying saucers and conversations with the departed it would not be so bad: but they are also deeply involved in racism, in quasi-Fascist nationalism, in every shade of fanatical hate cult, and in every semilunatic pressure group.
First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find out the meaning of life, no doubt. But in the last analysis the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for “finding himself.” If he persists in shifting this responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
A man is enriched by the faith, and if you will by the hope and humility, with which he calls on the most sweet Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ; and he is enriched also by peace and love. For these are truly a three-stemmed life-giving tree planted by God.
As soon as one is conscious of the presence of the Master, one must, in all passivity, abandon the work to Him.
Too much happiness, too much unhappiness, out of due time, men are thrown off balance. What will they do next? Thought runs wild. No control. They start everything, finish nothing. Here competition begins, here the idea of excellence is born, and robbers appear in the world.
We believe, not because we want to know, but because we want to be.
And when I thought there was no God and no love and no mercy, you were leading me all the while into the midst of His love and His mercy and taking me, without my knowing anything about it, to the house that would hide me in the secret of His Face.
In our present attitude the natural world remains a commodity to be bought and sold, not a sacred reality to be venerated.
Everything that happens to the poor, the meek, the desolate, the mourners, the despised, happens to Christ.
The humble man also loves himself, and seeks to be loved and honored, not because love and honor are due to him but because they are not due to him. He seeks to be loved by the mercy of God.
Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis but first of all by living.
I simply have no business being in love and playing around with a girl, however innocently... After all I am supposed to be a monk with a vow of chastity and though I have kept my vow – I wonder if I can keep it indefinitely and still play this gorgeous game!
The thing that crushed me was that I had never learned to dance.
Tu qui sedes in tenebris spe tua gaude: orta stella matutina, sol non tardabit.
There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.
TO say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. If, therefore, I do anything or think anything or say anything or know anything that is not purely for the love of God, it cannot give me peace, or rest, or fulfillment, or.
He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas.
To praise the contemplative life is not to reject every other form of life, but to seek a solid foundation for every other human striving. Without.
Perhaps in the end the first real step toward peace would be a realistic acceptance of the fact that our political ideals are perhaps to a great extent illusions and fictions to which we cling out of motives that are not always perfectly honest: that because of this we prevent ourselves from seeing any good or any practicability in the political ideals of our enemies – which may, of course, be in many ways even more illusory and dishonest than our own.