It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.

We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us.

Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.

If we seek paradise outside ourselves, we cannot have paradise in our hearts.

The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places.

The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.

Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost