The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise, we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them

Thank God! I am only another member of the human race, like all the rest of them... As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

The greatest politeness is free of all formality. Perfect conduct Is free of concern. Perfect wisdom is unplanned. Perfect love is without demonstrations. Perfect sincerity offers No guarantee.

People even lose their vocations because they find out that a man can spend forty or fifty or sixty years in a monastery and still have a bad temper.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

I, who had always been anti-naturalistic in art, had been a pure naturalist in the moral order. No wonder my soul was sick and torn apart: but now the bleeding wound was drawn together by the notion of Christian virtue, ordered to the union of the soul with God.

I often see it in people who have attained what the monastic tradition terms "detachment," an ability to live at peace with the reality of whatever happens. Such people do not have a closed-off air, nor a boastful demeanor. In them, it is clear, their wounds have opened the way to compassion for others. And compassion is the strength and soul of a religion.

Changeable women are more enduring than monotonous ones. They are sometimes murdered but seldom deserted.

The churches must learn humility as well as teach it.

We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

I always learn a lot when I do so. You know, when you step out of your comfort zone and even your cynical zone, and open yourself up to what other people might experience and why they do so.