Busyness is an enemy of true Kingdom experience.

My responsibility is to obey, to surrender my heart and to yield myself to the will of God. It is in the process of obedience that we gain understanding. You can't get the peace that passes understanding until you give up your right to understand.

I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

Everything happens for a reason, so you shouldn't get wound up.

Solitude is very different from a 'time-out' from our busy lives. Solitude is the very ground from which community grows. Whenever we pray alone, study, read, write, or simply spend quiet time away from the places where we interact with each other directly, we are potentially opened for a deeper intimacy with each other.

I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Since her childhood her parents and grandparents had taught her that she shouldn't waste her time asking God the whys and hows of life. Those problems were best left for Him to figure out.

To be one of God's lilies means an interior abandonment of the rarest kind. It means that we are to be infinitely passive, and yet infinitely active also; passive as regards self and its workings, active as regards attention and response to God. It is very hard to explain this so as to be understood But it means that we must lay down all the activity of the creature, as such, and must let only the activities of God work in us, and through us, and by us. Self must step aside, to let God work.

Quit playing, start praying. Quit feasting, start fasting. Talk less with men, talk more with God. Listen less to men, listen to the words of God. Skip travel, start travail.

The best travel is that which one can take by one's own fireside. In memory or imagination.

I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.