To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair

Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life

Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are

The logic of the poet – that is, the logic of language or the experience itself – develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant

To Serve the God of Love one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to love in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one’s neighbor

Love is free; it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love’s sake.

There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us

To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God.

The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom

How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived

What I do is live, how I pray is breathe, what I wear is pants.

We must slow down to a human tempo and we’ll begin to have time to listen.

It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception

Lovely morning! How lovely life can be!

The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives

God makes us ask ourselves questions most often when He intends to resolve them. He gives us needs that He alone can satisfy, and awakens capacities that He means to fulfill. Any perplexity is liable to be a spiritual gestation, leading to a new birth and a mystical regeneration.

AN ELDER was asked by a certain soldier if God would forgive a sinner. And he said to him: Tell me, beloved, if your cloak is torn, will you throw it away? The soldier replied and said: No. I will mend it and put it back on. The elder said to him: If you take care of your cloak, will God not be merciful to His own image?

If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is “just glass

The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical

It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives

Charity is without fear: having given all that it has, it has nothing left to lose

The fruitfulness of our lives depends in large measure in our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own work. The man who completely trusts his own estimate of himself is doomed to sterility

Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being’s awareness of itself in us

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

Thinking prevents the unconscious from speaking

The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them

The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe

We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full

Solitude is so necessary both for society and for the individual that when society fails to provide sufficient solitude to develop the inner life of the persons who compose it, they rebel and seek false solitudes

Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself

Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.

A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy

We cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great.

The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear

Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it

It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God

Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible.

In the devil’s theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrongs

The goal of fasting is inner unity

On Pride: This sickness is most dangerous when it succeeds in looking like humility. When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless

You pray best when the mirror of your soul is empty of every image except the Image of the Invisible Father

To be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy

Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves

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

Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ

We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us

In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart

The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living

Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God: for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice and mediocrity and materialism and selfishness that have chilled his faith

If you have love you will do all things well

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 only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God’s will and his grace.

Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found

Humble people can do great things with uncommon perfection because they are no longer concerned about their own interests and their own reputation, and therefore they no longer need to waste their efforts in defending them

While some men see ordinary happenings, others see divine light and guidance

The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error

Meditation is one of the ways in which the spiritual man keeps himself awake

You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice

For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point verged between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs.

Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains

We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others

If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.

For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God’s will, to be what God wants us to be.

To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions.

Teach me to go to the country beyond words and beyond names.

Christ is born to us today, in order that he may appear to the whole world through us.

Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist

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

Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part and a member of mankind

The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth.

The fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the wind, and join in the general Dance

To be alone by being part of the universe-fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without

But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question

Saints are what they are not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everyone else

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell

We are already ONE. We just think we are separate

Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God

Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focused on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a savior.

The end of the world will be legal

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

When we are strong, we are always much greater than the things that happen to us

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to… fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another. If my heart does not first belong to me, how can I give it to another?

Ultimately faith is the only key to the universe. The final meaning of human existence, and the answers to the questions on which all our happiness depends cannot be found in any other way

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

Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell

It might be good to open our eyes and see

The God of peace is never glorified by human violence

Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am

The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.