“The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.”

Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are.

In a world of noise, confusion and conflict it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace. In such places love can blossom.

For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air.

No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.

You are made in the image of what you desire.

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.

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife – but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren’t just housewives, they were community leaders.

The most mighty of nature’s laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life.

Better be an old maid, a woman with herself as a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fools; and every wise man knows himself to be one.

Once in one’s life, for one mortal moment, one must make a grab for immortality; if not, one has not lived.

I always wanted to live a man’s life in a woman’s body.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.