There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.

You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt.

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.

We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us.

Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible.

To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.

But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God's love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God.