We cannot possess the truth fully until it has entered into the very substance of our life by good habits, and by a certain perfection of moral activity.

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

There is a subtle but inescapable connection between the "sacred" attitude and the acceptance of one's in most self.

A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.

Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all others.

Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.

But it certainly is a wonderful thing to wake up suddenly in the solitude of the woods and look up at the sky and see the utter nonsense of everything including all the solemn stuff given out by professional asses about the spiritual life; and simply to burst out laughing, and laugh and laugh, with the sky and the trees because God is not in words, and not in systems, and not in liturgical movements, and not in "contemplation" with a big "C," or in asceticism or in anything like that, not even in the apostolate.