People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life.

When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.

Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.

The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it

a spiritual life without prayer is like the gospel without Christ.

Joy is based on the spiritual knowledge that, while the world in which we live is shrouded in darkness, God has overcome the world.

Christian life is not a life divided between times for action and times for contemplation. No. Real social action is a way of contemplation, and real contemplation is the core of social action.

In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.

Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.

The world is evil only when you become its slave.

Prayer is the center of the Christian life. It is the only necessary thing. It is living with God in the here and now.

Be bold! You will then see that life will find no time to attack you, because you are attacking it!

Topics... are what people talk about when they don't know each other well. Topics... are what men talk about.

He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

He could not tell all of the California pines apart, the gray pine from the coulter, the bushop from the knobcone and the Monterey.

I didn't get into acting to have a moment, I got into it because of people who've inspired me, like Judi Dench, Holly Hunter, and Jodie Foster.

I made career decisions that came from the part of me who wanted to shun the limelight.

The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.

Self-confidence may be mistaken for egotism if it is not accompanied by humility of the heart.

My friend, you thought you lost Him; that all your life you've been separated from Him. Filled with wonder, you've always looked outside for Him, and haven't searched within your own house.

I stopped caring so much about what people might think if I sung about love and humanity.