I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly . . . I feel sometimes as if I were a child who...
Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library.I don't know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly I wonder how many of them I ever wi...
...when I see a man or woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly.
That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth.
Light is constant, we just turn over in it.
It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.
It is...difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.[E]very memory is turned over and ove...
I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very...
I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal lovelin...
I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.
I don't know exactly what covetous is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.
When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.
If I had had this experience earlier in life, I would have been much wiser, much more compassionate. I really didn't understand what it was that made people who came to me so indifferent to good judge...
When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situa...
This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
There's so much to be grateful for, words are poor things.
There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense a...
There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we fee...
She closed one eye and looked at me and said, I know there is a blessing in this somewhere.It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you...
It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men.