“Love is not consolation, it is light.”

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Expectant waiting is the foundation of the spiritual life.

At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.

Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.

Religion as a source of consolation is an obstacle to true faith.

Fortunately the sky is beautiful everywhere.

Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty.

In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

Life did not present its sunny side to thee.

No one will hit you harder than life itself. It doesn’t matter how hard you hit back. It’s about how much you can take, and keep fighting, how much you can suffer and keep moving forward. That’s how you win.

Of all the possessions of this life fame is the noblest; when the body has sunk into the dust the great name still lives.

There are manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life.

A lot of my generation are living out the un-lived lives of our mothers.

If you enter the dark side of life, and come through it, you emerge with more strength and passion.

Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life.

I also found that for myself, since I’ve had no religious education, it was so interesting to see the different versions of heaven and what life on earth means.