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

To be spiritual is to be amazed.

I am still so surprised! That is why I am against it. We must learn to be surprised.

The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.

The essence of man is not what he is, but in what he is able to be.

Understanding God is not attained by calling into session all arguments for and against Him, in order to debate whether He is a reality or a figment of the mind.

There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.

Morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.

It is not a psychical quality, something that exists in the mind only, but a force from the beyond.

As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind.

Man’s sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God.

It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.

Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.

Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society.

Friendship, a puzzle to the syllogistic and critical mentality, is not based on experiments or tests of another person’s qualities but on trust.

There is no answer to Auschwitz…To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair

Prayer begins where our power ends.

He who rejects change is the architect of decay.

Flee sloth; for the indolence of the soul is the decay of the body.

History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster.

He who rejects change is the architect of decay.

Even if you make mistakes, I go back to those things, my not-so-great moments because those are my truest moments; those are my human moments. I’m not even mad at the things I said that were a little dicey.

Everything that makes diversity of kinds, of species, differences, properties… everything that consists in generation, decay, alteration and change is not an entity, but a condition and circumstance of entity and being, which is one, infinite, immobile, subject, matter, life, death, truth, lies, good and evil.

A debt may get mouldy, but it never decays.

The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.