“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.”

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.

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

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

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.

There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.

Most commit the same mistake with God that they do with their friends: they do all the talking.

All badness is spoiled goodness. A bad apple is a good apple that became rotten. Because evil has no capital of its own, it is a parasite that feeds on goodness.

Each of us comes into life with fists closed, set for aggressiveness and acquisition. But when we abandon life our hands are open; there is nothing on earth that we need, nothing the soul can take with it.

It is easy to find truth, though it is hard to face it, and harder still to follow it.

Our difficulties launch us into new states of consciousness where we are inspired to step out of the reality of our smallest thoughts and step into the limitless freedom of our biggest dreams.

It’s difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.

To step into acting was not that difficult a transition to make. What was difficult was the work and the practice that went into becoming good at it, because I hadn’t had any training.

Here’s the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

Faith enables many of us to endure life’s difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.

The older we become, the more difficult it is to fill our hearts with wonder. Only God is big enough to keep filling us with wonder.

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

The thing is, I live a very public life, and I have to keep things personal, or else I have no personal life. It’s very difficult.