10 “Hence the things that we love tell us who we are.”
12 “Too many ascetics fail to become great saints precisely because their rules and ascetic practices have merely deadened their humanity instead of setting it free to develop richly, in all its capacities, under the influence of grace.”
14 “Our five senses are dulled by inordinate pleasure.”
16 “A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for action. The activity proper to man is not 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.”
17 “Living is not thinking. Thought is formed and guided by objective reality outside us. Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new.”
49 “You are made in the image of what you desire. To unify your life, unify your desires.”
51 “Life reveals itself to us only in so far as we live it.”
56 “Great though books may be, friends though they may be to us, they are no substitute for persons, they are only means of contact with great persons, with men who had more than their own share of humanity, men who were persons for the whole world and not for themselves alone.”
65 “Identification by love leads to knowledge, recognition, intimate and obscure but vested with an inexpressible certainty known only in contemplation.”
82 “A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live. Thus, if one is called to be a solitary, he will stop wondering how he is to live and start living peacefully only when he is in solitude. But if one is not called to to a solitary life, the more he is alone the more he will worry about living and forget to live. When we are not living up to our true vocation, thought deadens our life, or substitutes itself for life, or gives in to life so that our life drowns out our thinking and stifles the voice of conscience. When we find our vocation, thought and life are one. Suppose one has found completeness in his true vocation. Now everything is in unity, in order, at peace. Now work no longer interferes with [thought] and [thought] with with work.”
89 “The humble man speaks only in order to be spoken to.”
90 “If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, will never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.”
121 “Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act we have no way of knowing what we are. And the experience of our existence is impossible without some experience of knowing or some experience of experience.”
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
