It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve.

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.

I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within.

Finally, I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am.

Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.

If you want to identify me, he says to the British officers who are questioning him, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person. page 25 in the book called, The Man in the Sycamore Tree by Edward Rice

What every man looks for in life is his own salvation and the salvation of the men he lives with. By salvation I mean first of all the full discovery of who he himself really is.

The peculiar grace of a shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.

For our duties and our needs, in all the fundamental things for which we were created, come down in practice to the same thing.

Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny.… To work out our identity in God.

To really know our "nothingness" we must also love it. And we cannot love it unless we see that it is good. And we cannot see that it is good unless we accept it.