“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.”

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.

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.

We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.

Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves.

The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.

A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.

Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.

Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.

Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.