“Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.”

Contradiction is the lever of transcendence.

Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.

There is only one fault, only one: our inability to feed upon light.

To die for God is not a proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is a proof of faith in God.

Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.

The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.

Love: To feel with one’s whole self the existence of another being.

One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us, and it is either directed somewhere into this world, or into another.

There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.

Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement.

The world is God’s language to us.

If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice of how he acts when he loses money.

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.

The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.

Treat yourself like someone you loved.

We are always in awe of what the donors have done in terms of providing of themselves to the recipients. It really is a heroic act because people take on themselves not only a risk of death but also pain-and-suffering in order for their loved one to get the benefit of the liver transplant.

I hope I make it a little softer here for someone.

I’m not really concerned about boundaries. I just follow my conscience and my heart. Follow your heart. That’s what I do. Compassion is something I have a lot of, because I’ve been through a lot of pain in my life. Anybody who has suffered a lot of pain has a lot of compassion.

I do my best to love everybody.

Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?

I’m trying to raise the awareness of the troops that, when they deploy and go to war, it’s not just them at war – it’s also their family. Their family is having to go through all the hardships and the stresses.

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.