“The dead are silent because they live, just as we chatter so loudly to try to make ourselves forget that we are dying. Their silence is really their call to me, the assurance of their immortal love for me.”

Grace can and does have a history.

Knowing God is more important than knowing about God.

The number one cause of atheism is Christians. Those who proclaim Him with their mouths and deny Him with their actions is what an unbelieving world finds unbelievable.

How often I have found that we grow to maturity not by doing what we like, but by doing what we should. How true it is that not every ‘should’ is a compulsion, and not every ‘like’ is a high morality and true freedom.

What Christ gives us is quite explicit if his own words are interpreted according to their Aramaic meaning. The expression ‘This is my Body’ means this is myself.

Learning always involves self-transcendence. Learning calls forth what is in us, helping us to move toward authenticity and wholeness.

Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise.

When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying.

In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.

Love alone allows man to forget himself… it alone can still redeem even the darkest hours of the past since it alone finds the courage to believe in the mercy of the holy God.

In the post-Christian world, all Christians will be mystics.

Childhood is not a state which only applies to the first phase of our lives in the biological sense. Rather it is a basic condition which is always appropriate to a life that is lived aright.

But there is yet another form of this hidden heresy, and, paradoxically, it can affect those who are proudest of their long-standing and unimpeachable orthodoxy; heresy in the form of indifference.

The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.

Meditating on the nature and dignity of prayer can cause saying at least one thing to God: Lord, teach us to pray!

Grace is everywhere as an active orientation of all created reality toward God.

My dear child, if you desire to be free from the cycle of birth and death, then abandon the objects of sense gratification as poison. Drink instead the nectar of forbearance, upright conduct, mercy, cleanliness and truth.

I’ve told you the four thunderstorms – disappointment, frustration, unfairness and isolation. You cannot avoid them, as like the monsoon they will come into your life at regular intervals. You just need to keep the raincoat handy to not let the spark die.

Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.

First our pleasures die – and then our hopes, and then our fears – and when these are dead, the debt is due dust claims dust – and we die too.

I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!

When you’re dead, you don’t breathe, you don’t see, you don’t feel, you don’t love.

I like going to areas where the murder rate is high and dropping it.

Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one after the other, its outer casings, and – as the snake from its skin, the butterfly from its chrysalis – emerges from one after another, passing into a higher state of consciousness.