“Being is transcended by a concern for being. Our perplexity will not be solved by relating human existence to a timeless, subpersonal abstraction which we call essence.”

In the midst of our applauding the feats of civilization, the Bible flings itself like a knife slashing our complacency; remind us that God, too, has a voice in history.

A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children.

At all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

New insight begins when satisfaction comes to an end, when all that has been seen, said, or done looks like a distortion. …

Faith like Job’s cannot be shaken becasue it is the result of having been shaken.

Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme.

Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness.

The road to the sacred leads through the secular.

Dear Lord, grant me the grace of wonder. Surprise me, amaze me, awe me in every crevice of your universe.

Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society’s hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.

We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being.

The tragedy of religion is partly due to its isolation from life, as if God could be segregated.

It is dangerous to take human freedom for granted, to regard it as a prerogative rather than as an obligation, as an ultimate fact rather than as an ultimate goal.

We cannot approach the spirit unless we repair the vessels. Reverence for words – an awareness of the wonder of words, of the mystery of words – is an essential prerequisite for prayer.

Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.

Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.

There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity.