If you attain fame and fortune, and do not attain gratitude along with it, the chances are that you will not enjoy that fame or that fortune.

No man can afford to express, through words or acts, that which is not in harmony with his own belief, and if he does so he must pay by the loss of his ability to influence others.

The Christian liturgy draws us deeper and deeper into the innermost recesses of mystery, but then lands us back out on the street. We are not allowed to stay at the altar. We have to go back out to committee meetings, traffic jams, laundry, dirty diapers—where we will be enacting what we have encountered in the liturgy.

By the same token, Christians find that, insofar as the "prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day" (the ordinary stuff of life) are taken and offered up to God in union with Jesus Christ's own self-offering, they are transfigured—transubstantiated—and restored to us, not as the inert routines of the day, or as sheer, intractable adversity, or as boredom, which they might otherwise appear to be, but rather as vessels for grace.

How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!

It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read.

The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.

A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.

Those who are not grateful soon begin to complain of everything.

To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything He has given us — and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love.

The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will.

I don't even need to know precisely what I am doing, except that I am acting for the love of God.