Accept the fact that you are accepted, despite the fact that you are unacceptable.

Parents need to listen as much to their kids as they do to them: "The first duty of love is to listen."

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain ....Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying, 'You are accepted.'

Genuine forgiveness is participation, reunion overcoming the powers of estrangement. . . We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love.

Language... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.

Every person, every place and every action is qualified by this association with the unconditional; it penetrates every moment of daily life and sanctifies it: "The Universe is God's sanctuary. Every work day is a day of the Lord, every supper is a Lord's supper, every work a fulfillment of the divine task, every joy a joy in God. In all preliminary concerns, ultimate concern is present, consecrating them."

Our search for such [moral] principles can start with . . . the unconditional imperative to acknowledge every person as a person. If we ask for the contents given by this absolute, we find, first, something negative-the command not to treat a person as a thing. This seems little, but it is much. It is the core of the principle of justice.