October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.
Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.
I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me.
The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.
Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation.
A daydream is an evasion.
Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.
The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.
To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.
Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.
Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.
Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.
Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery.
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 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.
