The long nights that Pier Giorgio Frassati spent on his knees in front of the Blessed Sacrament had something to do with the long days spent in service of the poor.

In a way, fasting is like the "calming of the monkey mind" effected by the rosary prayer: both are means of stilling the effervescence of relatively superficial preoccupations.

Beauty is the arrowhead of evangelization, the point with which the evangelist pierces the minds and hearts of those he evangelizes.

If the Word truly became flesh, then God had not only a mother, but also a grandmother, cousins, great-aunts, and weird uncles. If the Word truly dwelt among us, then he was part of a family that, like most, was fairly dysfunctional, a mix of the good and bad, the saintly and the sinful, the glorious and the not so glorious. And this is such good news for us.

Easter is an earthquake, an explosion. If you see it as less than that, you're not getting it.

We are exceptionally good at seeing the faults in others and exceptionally adept at ignoring the faults in ourselves.

Hans Urs von Balthasar maintained that the best evangelistic strategy is to capture people with the beautiful, then enchant them with the good, and then lead them to the true.