“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 perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air.

No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.

You are made in the image of what you desire.

When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable.

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.

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

Perhaps I am stronger than I think.

Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within.

When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God.

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false Self. We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.

May God prevent us from becoming “right-thinking men”-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.

When you see God in everyone, then they see God in you.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.

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

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.

It is said of great Empires, That the best way to preserve them from decay, is to bring them back to the first Principles, and Arts, on which they did begin.”

Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.

By regarding ourselves with kindness, we begin to dissolve the identity of an isolated, deficient self. This creates the grounds for including others in an unconditionally loving heart.

Brokenness is a beginning.

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I’ve left the opera house.

When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.