I want my work to create space where people can meet God, rather than give them something they can "apply" to their daily life.

He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.

All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.

had set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing.

It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.

Other people are quite dreadful.  The only possible society is oneself.

It was an important day in my life when at last I understood that if he needed forty days in the wilderness at one point, I very likely could use three or four.

The command is Do no work. Just make space. Attend to what is around you. Learn that you don't have to DO to BE. Accept the grace of doing nothing. Stay with it until you stop jerking and squirming.

It is much more important to cultivate the quiet, inward space of a constant listening than to always be approaching God for specific direction.

At some point in the late afternoon, preferably before dinner, while you are still experiencing the strength and rest of God, take fifteen minutes in quiet solitude to review and examine the day.

But—for good reasons rooted deeply in the nature of the person and of personal relationships—his preferred way is to speak, to communicate: thus the absolute centrality of scripture to our discipleship. And this, among other things, is the reason why an extensive use of solitude and silence is so basic for growth of the human spirit, for they form an appropriate context for listening and speaking to God.

And we can't all just get along. Rather, we have to become the kinds of persons who can get along. As a major part of this, our epidermal responses have to be changed in such a way that the fire and the fight doesn't start almost immediately when we are "rubbed the wrong way." Solitude and silence give us a place to begin the necessary changes, though they are not a place to stop.