Thomas Merton writes that if we have meditated on the events of the Passion but have not meditated on Dachau and Auschwitz, our perception of God at work in present times is incomplete.

The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.

Of all spiritual disciplines prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with the Father.

Freedom in the Gospel does not mean license. It means opportunity.

We do not have to have the correct answers to listen well. In fact, often the correct answers are a hindrance to listening well, for we become more anxious to give the correct answer than to hear.

To conform to a sick society is to become sick.

The great writings interact with one another. They cannot be read in isolation..

We are not trying to manipulate God and tell Him what to do. Rather, we are asking Him to tell us what to do.

Meditation sends us into our ordinary world with greater perspective and balance.

The truly Christian imagination never lets Jesus Christ out of her sight.

To listen to others quiets and disciplines the mind to listen to God.

They say the silence is the language of God, but so is music. This is why we dance, we become loud in our silence.

I figured if you want to get to where John Hammond is or Billy Gibbons is or Peter Wolf is, you have to start listening to the same stuff they did, and learn from that, and that's what I did.

A lot of young writers are very precious about their words. Don't be - you've got to be ready to burn stuff. You're not as good as you think you are, at least not yet.

The fruit does not make the tree good or bad but the tree itself is what determines the nature of the fruit. In the same way, a person first must be good or bad before doing a good or bad work.

Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.

If heaven exists, to know that there's laughs, that would be a great thing.

You see, the thing about dreams is that it’s never really too late to make them come true.

No one who was not by nature a lover of logic, and an extreme precisian in the use of words and phrases, could have written the two "Alice" books.

Everything is a test.

Russia is still the leader in world space exploration. But its position of leader involves great responsibility - we have no right to lag behind. We can and we must move constantly forward.