“Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.”

What makes us human is not our mind but our heart, not our ability to think but our ability to love.

Keep a space where God can let something totally new take place.

Your life is not going to be easy, and it should not be easy. It ought to be hard. It ought to be radical; it ought to be restless; it ought to lead you to places you’d rather not go.

You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.

The only feelings that do not heal are the ones you hide.

Compassion can never coexist with judgement because judgement creates the distance, the distinction, which prevents us from really being with the other.

You have to listen to the one who calls you beloved. That has to be affirmed over and over again. That is prayer – listening to the voice of the one who calls you “the beloved.”

Our life is a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment.

Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the Beloved.

Life is just a little opportunity for you during a few years to say, “I love you, too.”

I feel strongly that the God we meet in solitude is always the God who calls us to community.

Prayer is first of all listening to God. It’s openness. God is always speaking; he’s always doing something.

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

Learning to weep, learning to keep vigil, learning to wait for the dawn. Perhaps this is what it means to be human.

The fruits of your labors may be reaped two generations from now. Trust, even when you don’t see the results.

In our own woundedness, we can become sources of life for others.

It makes sense that if you good in your heart then you closer to God.

Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.

Madness is never that far away. It’s as close as saying yes to the wrong impulse.

Here you discover that so long as books are kept open, then minds can never be closed.

It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.

It is no advantage to be near the light if the eyes are closed.

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

When a door closes you have two choices: give up, or keep going.