I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within.

Ash Wednesday is full of joy...The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust.

A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass

Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within.

Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.

October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and crimson, and all the lassitudes of August have seeped out of your blood, and you are full of ambition. It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all.

The fruitfulness of our lives depends in large measure in our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own work. The man who completely trusts his own estimate of himself is doomed to sterility.