Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world's greatest need.

Becoming a Christian was terribly helpful to me. I can't imagine finding my way without it. I think it can be very crucially important to ally yourself with some religion.

The other day, the way people [do] who are approaching their 80th birthday, I was thinking about all the last business - funerals and where do you want to be buried - and I thought if anything were to be inscribed on my tombstone, I said let it be that.

Listen to your life. All moments are key moments.

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.

And because God's love is uncoercive and treasures our freedom - if above all he wants us to love him, then we must be left free not to love him - we are free to resist it, deny it, crucify it finally, which we do again and again. This is our terrible freedom, which love refuses to overpower so that, in this, the greatest of all powers, God's power, is itself powerless.

We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our lives but reactors, to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running the strongest.