We must ask ourselves how many times others would benefit more from our silence than from our words.

When you are still young and not yet adult, you want to hold everything in your own hands, but if you have your hands open toward prayer, you are able to stretch out your arms and let yourself be led without knowing where. You know only the freedom which God's breath has brought you will lead to new life, even if the cross is the only sign of it you can see.

Through prayer we can carry in our heart all human pain and sorrow, all conflicts and agonies, all torture and war, all hunger, loneliness and misery, not because of some great psychological or emotional capacity, but because God's heart has become one with ours.

If you meet God in solitude, you discover the God you meet is the God who embraces all people.

Solitude does not pull us away from our fellow human beings but instead makes real fellowship possible.

When you have loved deeply, that love can grow even stronger after the death of the person you love. That is the core message of Jesus.

When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.