Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.

And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?

When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God.

But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.

Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence.