Prayer, even more than eating or sleeping, is not a luxury but a necessity, and we are only fully human when we remember this and arrange our life accordingly.

The world is not divided into the strong who care and the weak who are cared for. We must each in turn care and be cared for, not just because it is good for us, but because it is the way things are.

It is precisely because we cannot see God that we can only know that our prayer is valid by the effect it has upon our lives, by the way we treat our neighbor.

This conversion into prayer of our everyday joys, sorrows, hopes and desires is at first a conscious labor, but after a while it becomes second nature, so that converse with God becomes inextricably and wonderfully woven into the fabric of our lives.

We only deliberately waste time with those we love -- it is the purest sign that we love someone if we choose to spend time idly in their presence when we could be doing something more 'constructive.

Slowly I learn the importance of powerlessness. I experience it in my own life and I live with it in my work. The secret is not to be afraid of it—not to run away. The dying know that we are not God… All they ask is that we do not desert them.

The tension between the call to the desert and to the market place arises not from the greater presence of God in one or the other but from our varying psychological needs to apprehend him in different ways.