Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.

There is one act par excellence which profanes money by going directly against the law of money, an act for which money is not made. That act is giving.

Christians were never meant to be normal. We’ve always been holy troublemakers, we’ve always been creators of uncertainty, agents of dimension that’s incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way that God wants it to be. And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.

In sum, thought and reflection have been rendered thoroughly pointless by the circumstances in which modern men and women live and act.

If man--if each one of us--abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values; if each one of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these determinants, then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinates will be transformed into inevitabilities.

Prayer is not a discourse. It is a form of life, the life with God. That is why it is not confined to the moment of verbal statement.

The fact of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is knowing what to read.