Silence has many dimensions. It can be a regression and an escape, a loss of self, or it can be presence, awareness, unification, self-discovery. Negative silence blurs and confuses our identity, and we lapse into daydreams or diffuse anxieties. Positive silence pulls us together and makes us realize who we are, who we might be, and the distance between these two.

How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me?

Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good.

The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.

God must be allowed the right to speak unpredictably.... We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend. We must find him in the pagan or we will lose him in our own selves, substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction.

To be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.

May we all grow in grace and peace and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us.