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

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.

The riches of the soul are stored up in its memory. this is the test of character, not whether a man follows the daily fashion, but whether the past is alive in his present.

Sometimes there seems to be a greater separation between the church and God than between the church and state.

Human being is both being in the world and living in the world. Living involves responsible understanding of one’s role in relation to all other beings.

Our age is one in which usefulness is thought to be the chief merit of nature; in which the attainment of power

The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy.

You know, your species [humans] has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by its ingenuity in trying to destroy itself.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

Mom used to say that politeness is deception in pretty packaging

Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.

Since then [1958 Coup in Iraq], reality started to take another form in my mind. Hence, I was aware of deception of our senses.

Love is a deception and a trap.

Holding on to anger as a personal possession will cause suffering. If anger really belonged to us, it would have to obey us. If it doesn’t obey us, that means it’s only a deception.