“When I marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.”

When religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.

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.

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

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.

For harmony makes small states great, while discord undermines the mightiest empires.

When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

I have done many impious things–no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit many crimes.

Quintilius Varus, Give me back my legions!

In private enterprises men may advance or recede, whereas they who aim at empire have no alternative between the highest success and utter downfall.

I have done many impious things–no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit many crimes.

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.