“[God] says to pray for our enemies. How many of us have ever spent time praying for our enemies?”

“The Steadfast Love of the Lord is not Seasonal; His Mercies do not have winter or summer days... They are new every now and then.”

“It was only in South Africa that I got over this shyness, though I never completely overcame it. It was impossible for me to speak impromptu. I hesitated whenever I had to face strange audiences and avoided making a speech whenever I could. Even today I do not think I could or would even be inclined to keep a meeting of friends engaged in idle talk. I must say that, beyond occasionally exposing me to laughter, my constitutional shyness has been no disadvantage whatever. In fact I can see that, on the contrary, it has been all to my advantage. My hesitancy in speech, which was once an annoyance, is now a pleasure. Its greatest benefit has been that it has taught me the economy of words. I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts. And I can now give myself the certificate that a thoughtless word hardly ever escapes my tongue or pen. I do not recollect ever having had to regret anything in my speech or writing. I have thus been spared many a mishap and waste of time. Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. Proneness to exaggerate, to suppress or modify the truth, wittingly or unwittingly, is a natural weakness of man, and silence is necessary in order to surmount it. A man of few words will rarely be thoughtless in his speech; he will measure every word. We find so many people impatient to talk. There is no chairman of a meeting who is not pestered with notes for permission to speak. And whenever the permission is given the speaker generally exceeds the time-limit, asks for more time, and keeps on talking without permission. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth.”

“Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.”

“Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. Psalm 30:5b Have you ever noticed that being upset or downtrodden about problems never changes them? Sometimes we don’t take time to look at the fruit of our actions, but if we did, surely we would see that worry is useless. We can learn to enjoy the journey of life, even when it takes us in a different direction than we had planned.”

“Be weird. Be random. Be who you are. Because you never know who would love the person you hide.”

“Hence, we should not be attached even to a good cause. Only then will our means remain pure and our actions too.”

“In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive

“The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”

“and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.” 

“Sé con seguridad que lo que vivimos es en lo que nos convertimos, cada mujer es el reflejo de lo que piensa. Si absorbemos hora tras hora imágenes y mensajes que no reflejan lo maravillosas que somos, no es de sorprenderse que caminemos por ahí sintiéndonos vacías, sin nuestra fuerza vital. Y si nos sintonizamos con docenas de actos brutales cada semana, tampoco debe sorprendernos que nuestros niños vean la violencia como una forma aceptable de resolver los conflictos.”

“God is directing every one of your steps.”

“your poverty is serving no one. If you’re a charitable person, you’d be a whole lot more charitable if you had lots of money.”

“What a deep [trust] in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work!”

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”