“We have to fight them daily, lake fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.”

To live fully, outwardly and inwardly, not to ignore the external reality for the sake of the inner life, or the reverse, that’s quite a task.

I don’t want to be anything special. I only want to try to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfill its promise.

Sometimes I try my hand at turning out small profundities and uncertain short stories, but I always end up with just one single word: God.

If one finds the strength to deal with small things, one finds it to deal with the large ones as well.

Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.

There are moments when I feel like giving up or giving in, but I soon rally again and do my duty as I see it: to keep the spark of life inside me ablaze.

Life cannot be captured in a few axioms. And that is just what I keep trying to do. But it won’t work, for life is full of endless nuances and cannot be captured in just a few formulae.

I would be so exhausted by my determination that I had no strength left to do the actual work.

Every day I shall put my papers in order and every day I shall say farewell. And the real farewell, when it comes, will only be a small outward confirmation of what has been accomplished within me from day to day.

I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.

I don’t think I have nerves of steel, far from it, but I can certainly stand up to things. I am not afraid to look suffering straight in the eyes.

Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.

The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.

If one burdens the future with one’s worries, it cannot grow organically. I am filled with confidence, not that I shall succeed in worldly things, but that even when things go badly for me I shall still find life good and worth living.

I know and share the many sorrows a human being can experience, but I do not cling to them; they pass through me, like life itself, as a broad eternal stream…and life continues.

It is the only thing we can do. Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others. And remember that every atom of hate that we add to this world makes it sill more inhospitable

The worst reaction someone can have is, “eh.”

Security wins many battles but loses the security war.

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.

It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other; but if they are nothing in themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.

This life is not something that is imposed upon us; we receive it and work with it.

Add to that the envy that one child feels for the accomplishments of the other;

I’m not an expert in the sociological realities of all the pastors in the world, but I would say that there are some very, very positive things about the state of integrity in church leaders.

In pain a new time is born.