“Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt.”

Be patient with everyone, but above all with yourself. I mean do not be disheartened by your imperfections, but always rise up with fresh courage.

Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength.

Anxiety is the greatest evil that can befall a soul, except sin. God commands you to pray, but He forbids you to worry.

In everything, love simplicity.

Humility consists in not esteeming ourselves above other men, and in not seeking to be esteemed above them.

True progress quietly and persistently moves along without notice.

It matters little how one begins, provided that he be resolved to go on well, and to end well.

To live according to the spirit is to love according to the spirit.

Flowers often grow more beautifully on dung-hills than in gardens that look beautifully kept.

Great occasions for serving God come seldom, but little ones surround us daily.

Pride dies 20 minutes after death.

You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.

Let us think only of spending the present day well. Then when tomorrow shall have come, it will be called today, and then we will think about it.

There is nothing small in the service of God.

Nothing appeases an enraged elephant so much as the sight of a little lamb.

During the night we must wait for the light.

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.

There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.

The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.

…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.