“Weaknesses and deficiencies play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another.”

When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable.

The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical.

Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.

Perhaps I am stronger than I think.

Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within.

When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God.

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false Self. We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.

May God prevent us from becoming “right-thinking men”-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.

When you see God in everyone, then they see God in you.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.

If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.

Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible.

Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.

It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.

Don’t just live a life; build one.

As a poet, one lives a bit on air. I always like someone who can teach me something practical.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.

I could die for you. But I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, live for you.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.