How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city?

A gentle sense of humor will be alert to detect anything that savors of a pious 'act' on the part of the penitent.

O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't.

Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between 'things' and 'God' as if God were another thing and as if creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God.

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.

Christ is born to us today, in order that he may appear to the whole world through us.

For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness