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.

Indeed, it is a kind of quintessence of pride to hate and fear even the kind and legitimate approval of those who love us! I mean, to resent it as a humiliating patronage.

But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact pleases You.

It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.

The peculiar grace of a shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.

If you find God with great ease, perhaps it is not God you have found.

It is not possible to be intimate with more than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common.

The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.

To be unknown to God is entirely too much privacy.

But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others.

What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe.

It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.

How do you expect to arrive at the end of your journey if you take the road to another man's city?(100)

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night.

I find I serve the world best by keeping my distance and freedom.

Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

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

There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.

For our duties and our needs, in all the fundamental things for which we were created, come down in practice to the same thing.

People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.

The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. p. 22

True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.

Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, the perfection of His love.

The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.

The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.

Where self-interest is the bond, The friendship is dissolved When calamity comes. Where Tao is the bond, Friendship is made perfect By calamity.

The religious answer is not really religious if it's not fully real. Evasion is the answer of superstition.

There is in every intellect a natural exigency for a true concept of God: we are born with the thirst to know and to see Him, and therefore it cannot be otherwise.

The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.

Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.

What every man looks for in life is his own salvation and the salvation of the men he lives with. By salvation I mean first of all the full discovery of who he himself really is.

Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

They're in love. Fuck the war.

Why should things be easy to understand?

Keep cool but care

Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.

A screaming comes across the sky.

Shall I project a world?

All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.

Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.

It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.

There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.

You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

What, I should only trust good people? Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.

If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

Though it is not often that death is so clearly told to fuck off.