If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success . . . If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.

Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the one thing necessary may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed.

The earthly desires men cherish are shadows. There is no true happiness in fulfilling them. Why, then, do we continue to pursue joys without substance? Because the pursuit itself has become our only substitute for joy. Unable to rest in anything we achieve, we determine to forget our discontent in a ceaseless quest for new satisfactions. In this pursuit, desire itself becomes our chief satisfaction.

LXXXI ABBOT PASTOR was asked by a certain brother: How should I conduct myself in the place where I live? The elder replied: Be as cautious as a stranger; wherever you may be, do not desire your word to have power before you, and you will have rest.

I am happy that I can at least want to love God. Perhaps that is all I've got, but it is already all that is essential. And He will take care of the rest.

In many ways, airplane travel mimics the asceticism of the early desert monks: a limited and uncomfortable physical space in which to sit, limited availability of water, food that is less than appetizing, small chance of getting much sleep.

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

Industry, thrift and self-control are not sought because they create wealth, but because they create character.

A lifetime of happiness? No man could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

But I don't want more things than I need, either.

True contentment is the power of getting of any situation all that there is in it.

It matters very little whether a man is discontented in the name of pessimism or progress, if his discontent does in fact paralyse his power of appreciating what he has got.