A life of love is difficult, but it is not a bleak or unrewarding life. In fact, it is the only true human and happy life, for it is filled with concerns that are as deep as life, as wide as the whole world, and as far reaching as eternity. It is only when we have consented to love, and have agreed to forget ourselves, that we can find our fulfillment. This fulfillment will come unperceived and mysterious like the grace of God, but we will recognize it and it will be recognized in us.

Old cranks have practiced all their lives, just as old saints have likewise practiced all their lives. They just practiced different life principles.

There are only two potential tragedies in life, and dying young isn't one of them. These are the two real tragedies: If you go through life and you don't love ... and if you go through life and you don't tell those whom you love that you love them.

It is essential that our love be liberating, not possessive. We must at all times give those we love the freedom to be themselves. Love affirms the other as other. It does not possess and manipulate another as mine.

By afflictions God is spoiling us of what otherwise might have spoiled us. When he makes the world too hot for us to hold, we let it go.

There is no fixed, true and real person inside of you or me, precisely because being a person necessarily implies becoming a person, being in process.

You just don't make decisions about what you're going to be like when you are old. I know that I am making that decision right now. Every time we perceive ourselves, others, life, the world and God in a certain way, we are deepening the habits that will take over in old age. Every time I act on the insights that I am getting now I am deciding my future and choosing to be a kindly or cynical old man. Our yesterdays lie heavily upon our todays and our todays will lie heavily upon our tomorrows.