“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.”

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

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments.

The test of love is in how one relates not to saints and scholars but to rascals.

Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.

The universe is full of dead people who lived by assumption.

Begin challenging your own assumptions.

There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.

All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in. If you challenge your own, you won’t be so quick to accept the unchallenged assumptions of others.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in.

Love can only consist in failure…on the fallacious assumption that it is a relationship. But it is not. It is a production of truth.