“Mundus vult decipi’—the world wants to be deceived.”

God cannot be sensed as a second thought, as an explanation of the origin of the universe. He is either the first and the last, or just another concept.

He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor.

There is a war to wage against the vulgar, the glorification of the absurd, a war that is incessant, universal.

God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.

I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder.

Faith is an awareness of divine mutuality and companionship, a form of communion between God and man.

To sense a ray of God’s radiance in the jungles of history.

Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.

Few are guilty, but all are responsible.

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.

Man has indeed become primarily a tool-making animal, and the world is now a gigantic tool box for the satisfaction of his needs.

The self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel. It is precisely the function of prayer to shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.

Self-sufficiency, independence, the capacity to stand apart, to differ, to resist, and to defy-all are modes of being human.

There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain.

Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man’s attitude toward history and nature.

Ruled by the prince of darkness and the master of deception who wears many disguises and has many aliases.

The Mafia and crime bosses of this world are amateurs compared to this syndicate.

When you love someone, you can’t lie to them. It hurts to much. It’s a deception that goes too deep.

Deceit is the false road to happiness; and all the joys we travel through to vice, like fairy banquets, vanish when we touch them.

A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.

Profit is sweet, even if it comes from deception.

Truth lives on in the midst of deception.

The fundamental factor of self-deception is this constant desire to be something in this world and in the world hereafter.