“Sometimes my day is crammed full of people and talk and yet I have the feeling of living in utter peace and quiet. And the tree outside my window, in the evenings, is a greater experience than all those people put together.”

Everything is chance, or nothing is chance. If I believed the first, I would be unable to live on, but I am not yet fully convinced of the second.

We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.

Every word born of an inner necessity – writing must never be anything else.

Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion.

Suffering has always been with us; does it really matter in what form it comes? All that matters is how we bear it and how we fit it into our lives.

Life is good, after all…and that’s what stays with me, even now, even when I’m about to be packed off to Poland.

I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one’s inner life. And that too is a deed.

Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inwards in prayer for five short minutes.

The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us.

Our desire must be like a slow and stately ship, sailing across endless oceans, never in search of safe anchorage. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, it will find mooring for a moment.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

And now that I don’t want to own anything any more and am free, now I suddenly own everything, now my inner riches are immeasurable.

How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.

Sometimes I feel that every word spoken and every gesture made merely serve to exacerbate misunderstandings. Then what I would really like is to escape into a great silence and impose that silence on everyone else.

I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned.

One must also accept that one has ‘uncreative’ moments. The more honestly one can accept that, the quicker these moments will pass.

For some the fairest thing on the dark earth is Thermopylae, And the Spartan phalanx lowering lances to die.

Don’t use it for sexual high jinks. It can get ugly – trust me. Also be careful when flushing.

For the Order wishes to be secret and to work in silence

I’m afraid I did not pray hard enough last night.

There exists a meaning, hidden from day to day, but accessible in moments of greatest attentiveness, in those moments when consciousness loves the world.

That fear of missing out on things makes you miss out on everything.

If only Jesus’ followers shared his personality. That one shift alone would correct so many of the ridiculous and horrifying things that pass for popular Christianity.

Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.