Stand in the divine rain, and seeds of wisdom will grow in your soul.
Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, I am. We are ontological oxymorons.
God gives us not only the truth but also the ability to believe it; not only the new thing to see but also the new eye to see it with.
It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively.
By the way, if you get mad at your Mac laptop and wonder who designed this demonic device, notice the manufacturer’s icon on top: an apple with a bite out of it.
Saint Thomas Aquinas says, wisely, that the only way to drive out a bad passion is by a stronger good passion. The same is true of thoughts as of passions. When your mind wanders, like a child, your will must bring it back, like a mother. [. . .] The will-parent must discipline the mind-child, avoiding both the opposite extremes commonly made in disciplining either children or thoughts: tyranny or permissiveness.
Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces nice people, not heroes.
It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable.
If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That’s not fundamentalism, that’s the law of non-contradiction.
The connection between art and Christ is like the connection between sunlight and the sun. It is, in fact, the connection between Sonlight and the Son.
Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.
The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.
We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.
The heart is like a woman, and the head is like a man, and although man is the head of woman, woman is the heart of man, and she turns man’s head because she turns his heart.
The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life―until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty.
I guarantee you that after you die you will not say ‘I spent too much time praying; I wish I had watched more TV instead.
Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.
Only because a bird doesn’t swim in the ocean but flies in the air can it enter the ocean from above; only because God is not temporal can he enter into time.
Sacraments are like hoses. They are the channels of the living water of God’s grace. Our faith is like opening the faucet. We can open it a lot, a little, or not at all.
It is just as crazy not to be crazy about Christ as it is to be crazy about anything else.
Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited love.
God really performs the miracle of multiplying our time, but only if we give it to him first.
The heart is like a woman, and the head is like a man, and although man is the head of woman, woman is the heart of man, and she turns man’s head because she turns his heart.
Those who meet Jesus always experience either joy or its opposites, either foretastes of Heaven or foretastes of Hell. Not everyone who meets Jesus is pleased, and not everyone is happy, but everyone is shocked.
This is the secret of life: the self lives only by dying, finds its identity (and its happiness) only by self-forgetfulness, self-giving, self-sacrifice, and agape love.