At the heart of personality is the need to feel a sense of being lovable without having to qualify for that acceptance.
Sickness may be the solemn occasion of God’s intervention in a person’s life.
To be right is dangerous, it has ever been the source of all intolerance.
The worst thing is not being wrong, but being sure one is not wrong.
Many ordinary illnesses are nothing but the expression of a serious dissatisfaction with life.
The most tragic consequence of our criticism of a man is to block his way to humiliation and grace, precisely to drive him into the mechanisms of self justification and into his faults instead of freeing him from them. For him, our voice drowns the voice of God.
Woe to the man who tries to remain objective and to maintain a wide perspective: every one will label him as an enemy.
The really important thing in life is not the avoidance of mistakes, but the obedience of faith. By obedience, the man is led step by step to correct his errors, whereas nothing will ever happen to him if he doesn’t get going.
Listen to all the conversations of our world, between nations as well as between individuals. They are, for the most part, dialogues of the deaf.
Marriage teaches you loyalty, forbearance, self-restraint, meekness, and a great many other things you wouldn’t need if you had stayed single.
The real meaning of travel, like that of a conversation by the fireside, is the discovery of oneself through contact with other people, and its condition is self-commitment in the dialogue.
We do not posses God. We find him periodically.
Most illnesses do not, as is generally thought, come like a bolt out of the blue. The ground is prepared for years through faulty diet, intemperance, overwork, and moral conflicts, slowly eroding the subject’s vitality.
Let us not seek to bring religion to others, but let us endeavor to live it ourselves.
We are always looking for a grand program of action full of great ideas, when the thing is to begin by obeying the little ideas.
Recounting of a life story, a mind thinking aloud leads one inevitably to the consideration of problems which are no longer psychological but spiritual.
If there had been no fear of failure, neither would there be any joy in success.
Your manner of life now is already determining your life in those years of old age and retirement, without your realizing it even, and perhaps without your giving enough thought to it. One must therefore prepare oneself for retirement.
No one can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood by at least one person.
The more refined and subtle our minds, the more vulnerable they are.
A man makes himself hard and inflexible in order to escape his guiltiness. The strange paradox present on every page of the Gospels and which we can verify any day, is that it is not guilt which is the obstacle to grace, as moralism supposes. On the contrary, it is the repression of guilt, self-justification, genuine self-righteousness and smugness which is the obstacle.