A machine for making revolutions is doing precisely the wrong thing at just the right time.

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.

Those who imagine that they can discover special gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God's will and his grace.

There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.

IT is not that someone else is preventing you from living happily; you yourself do not know what you want. Rather than admit this, you pretend that someone is keeping you from exercising your liberty. Who is this? It is you yourself.

Providence, that is the love of God, is very wise in turning away from the self-will of men, and in having nothing to do with them, and leaving them to their own devices, as long as they are intent on governing themselves, to show them to what depths of futility and sorrow their own helplessness is capable of dragging them. And

Free will is not given to us merely as a firework to be shot off into the air. There are some men who seem to think their acts are freer in proportion as they are without purpose, as if a rational purpose imposed some kind of limitation upon us. That is like saying that one is richer if he throws money out the window than if he spends it.

Providence, that is the love of God, is very wise in turning away from the self-will of men, and in having nothing to do with them, and leaving them to their own devices, as long as they are intent on governing themselves, to show them to what depths of futility and sorrow their own helplessness is capable of dragging them.

Discretion tells us what God wants of us and what He does not want of us.

We are not responsible for more than our own action, but for this we should take complete responsibility. Then the results will follow of themselves, in a manner we may not always be able to foresee. We do not always have to foresee every possibility.

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.

To see how seriously men take things and yet how little their seriousness profits them. Their tragedy makes our mediocrity all the more terrible.