As soon as one is conscious of the presence of the Master, one must, in all passivity, abandon the work to Him.

To praise the contemplative life is not to reject every other form of life, but to seek a solid foundation for every other human striving. Without

The perfection of twelfth-century Cistercian architecture is not to be explained by saying that the Cistercians were looking for a new technique. I am not sure that they were looking for a new technique at all. They built good churches because they were looking for God. And they were looking for God in a way that was pure and integral enough to make everything they did and everything they touched give glory to God.

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.

One reason why we are less fervent than we ought to be is that we cripple our own spirit by taking ourselves too seriously. We expect too much from ourselves when we ought to expect everything from God on Whom we utterly depend.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender oneself to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. It destroys one's own capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of one's own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes the work fruitful.

Being totally committed to Jesus and living to give. If you are not living to give, then you are living for yourself and cutting off the flow of God. Living to give will bring you into the place of living from your giving. Giving

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.

Life is so much when we focus on what truly matters.

We do not need more intellectual power, we need more spiritual power. We do not need more of the things that are seen, we need more of the things that are unseen.

We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp.