If you look at every flower individually, they look quite miserable. Put them together in a vase and they become a bouquet and that's quite attractive. I think about our community often in that way

When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.

Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.

The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it

a spiritual life without prayer is like the gospel without Christ.

Joy is based on the spiritual knowledge that, while the world in which we live is shrouded in darkness, God has overcome the world.

Christian life is not a life divided between times for action and times for contemplation. No. Real social action is a way of contemplation, and real contemplation is the core of social action.

In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.

Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.

The world is evil only when you become its slave.

People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life.

People dumber than you are making a fortune.

do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat

far too many politicians suffer from foot and mouth disease

I came to New York to be a fine artist - that was my ambition.

O woman! woman! thou shouldest have few sins of thine own to answer for! Thou art the author of such a book of follies in a man that it would need the tears of all the angels to blot the record out.

Knowing our personal mission further enhances the flow of mysterious coincidences as we are guided toward our destinies.

No amount of anxiety or worry is going to make any difference to anything that's going to happen anyway, so why let yourself feel so heavy?

Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape.

All on the street, you get treated like a street cat: "All right, you've been eatin' enough, you're fat, get out of the way now and let somebody else come by."

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds.