“We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn, or scoff at the totality of being.”

All action is vicarious faith.

The utilization of its resources is taken to be the chief purpose of man in God’s creation.

This may be the vocation of man: to say “Amen” to being and to the Author of being; to live in defiance of absurdity, notwithstanding futility and defeat; to attain faith in God even in spite of God.

By the word of God the world was created.

It is our honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality our confrontation with that which transcends the given.

The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.

A soul can create only when alone.

Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.

The time for the kingdom may be far off, but the task is plain: to retain our share in God in spite of peril and contempt.

In any free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty – all are responsible.

Instead of indulging in jealousy, greed, in relishing themselves, there are men who keep their hearts alert to the stillness in which time rolls on and leaves us behind.

Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment.

In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch.

Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state–it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle.

to become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words…the tangent to the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language.

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.

The single sculler, alone on the river at dawn, or spotlighted in his lane during a race, is th emost romantic, the most quixotic figure in all rowing.

Dawn has power to fertilise the most matter-of-fact vision.

Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.

The past is the beginning of the beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

The dawn is not distant, nor is the night starless; love is eternal.

For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing.

When dawn comes, that memory gradually distances…Tonight, I will bring it to sleep with me, so that will not be taken away by the waves of the night.

Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap.