Books that speak like God speak with too much authority to entertain us. Those that speak like good men hold us by their human charm; we grow by finding ourselves in them.

as soon as you think of yourself as teaching contemplation to others, you make another mistake. No one teaches contemplation except God, who gives it. The best you can do is write something that will serve as an occasion for someone else to realize what God wants of him.

We believe, not because we want to know, but because we want to be.

I could recognize that those who thought about God had a good way of considering Him, and that those who believed in Him really believed in someone, and their faith was more than a dream.

Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis but first of all by living.

Jesus, I put myself in Your hands. I rest in Your wisdom that has arranged all things for me. I promise to stop jumping out of Your arms to try and walk on my own feet, forgetting that I am no longer on the ground or near it!

The first step in identifying "heresy" is to refuse all identifications with the subjective intuitions and experience of the "heretic," and to see his words only in an impersonal realm in which there is no dialogue - in which dialogue is denied a priori .

Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked. And there is a far worse anxiety, a far worse insecurity, which comes from being afraid to ask the right questions — because they might turn out to have no answer. One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask.

To know when to stop To know when you can get no further By your own action, This is the right beginning!

2. If, instead of trusting in God, I trust only in my own intelligence, my own strength, and my own prudence, the means that God has given to me to find my way to Him will all fail me. Nothing created is of any ultimate use without hope. To place your trust in visible things is to live in despair.

So much depends on our idea of God! Yet no idea of Him, however pure and perfect, is adequate to express Him as He really is. Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him. We

In one sense we are always travelling, and travelling as if we did not know where we were going. In another sense we have already arrived.