The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.

It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.

Once you are born in this world you’re old enough to die.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

to have faith is precisely to lose one's mind so as to win God.

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

Teach me, O Lord, to glory in my cross. Teach me the value of my thorns. Show me how I have climbed to You through my path of pain. Show me that it is through my tears that I have seen rainbows.

The test of an abstract picture, for me, is not my first reaction to it, but how long I can stand it hanging on the wall of a room where I am living.

There is no one quite as angry as someone who has just lost a lot of money.

The end of wisdom is consultation and deliberation.

Cash-for-Clunkers program was a stupid idea.

The worst moment from all of this was driving from that doctor's office, to tell my wife that I was HIV positive.

There's something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don't work for me, and I reckon it don't work for only just the right kind.

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.

The people that you have around you are your biggest influence.

Is beauty beautiful, or is it only our eyes that make it so?