There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.

Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.

The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.