But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.

Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.

Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.

A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair.

No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.

And of course most non-Catholics imagine that the Church is immensely rich, and that all Catholic institutions make money hand over fist, and that all the money is stored away somewhere to buy gold and silver dishes for the Pope and cigars for the College of Cardinals.