“Nothing is more destined to create deep-seated anxieties in people than the false assumption that life should be free from anxieties.”

When a child is given to his parents, a crown is made for that child in Heaven, and woe to the parents who raise a child without consciousness of that eternal crown!

God does not love us because we are valuable. We are valuable because God loves us.

Most of us do not like to look inside ourselves for the same reason we don’t like to open a letter that has bad news.

The difference between the love of a man and the love of a woman is that a man will always give reasons for loving, but a woman gives no reasons for loving.

Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right.

Sometimes the only way the good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them.

Freedom does not mean that right to do whatever we please, but rather to do as we ought. The right to do whatever we please reduces freedom to a physical power and forgets that freedom is a moral power.

It was to a virgin woman that the birth of the Son of God was announced. It was to a fallen woman that his resurrection was announced.

Prayer begins by talking to God, but it ends by listening to Him. In the face of Absolute Truth, silence is the soul’s language.

It is not particularly difficult to find thousands who will spend two or three hours a day in exercising, but if you ask them to bend their knees to God in five minutes of prayer they protest that it is too long.

Hearing nuns’ confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.

Believe the incredible and you can do the impossible.

If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself.

It’s impossible to lose your footing when you’re on your knees.

If we wish to have the light, we must keep the sun; if we wish to keep our forests we must keep our trees; if we wish to keep our perfumes, we must keep our flowers- and if we wish to keep our rights, then we must keep our God.

Let those who think that the Church pays too much attention to Mary give heed to the fact that Our Blessed Lord Himself gave ten times as much of His life to her as He gave to His Apostles.

A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.

What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It’s what makes us human beings.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.

I pass for a hypersensitive, reclusive neurotic, which I may well be, but I hope the year won’t come when my anxieties and fatigue will destroy my love of this life, of all the things that inspire me–a line of music, a face in a Vermeer portrait, a character in an opera, or a model born in Harlem.

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.

Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.

It is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible.

The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.