In prayer the soul comes nearest the experience of absolute love: in belief it ascends by means of symbols towards absolute truth.

The mystic cannot wholly do without symbol and image, inadequate to his vision though they must always be: for his experience must be expressed if it is to be communicated, and its actuality is inexpressible except in some hint or parallel which will stimulate the dormant intuition of the reader.

Deliberately seek opportunities for kindness, sympathy, and patience.

Spiritual achievement costs much, though never as much as it is worth.

Delicate humor is the crowning virtue of the saints.

We mostly spend those lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do.

Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth.