“New eyes awaken.I send Love's name into the world with wingsAnd songs grow up around me like a jungle.Choirs of all creatures sing the tunesYour Spirit played in Eden.Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradiseShine on the face of the abyssAnd I am drunk with the great wildernessOf the sixth day in Genesis.But sound is never half so fairAs when that music turns to airAnd the universe dies of excellence.Sun, moon and starsFall from their heavenly towers.Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore.Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,All fear another wind, another thunder:Then one more voiceSnuffs all their flares in one gust.And I go forth with no more wine and no more starsAnd no more buds and no more EdenAnd no more animals and no more sea:While God sings by himself in acres of nightAnd walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.”

“It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.”

“It is by the Holy Spirit that we love those who are united to us in Christ. The more plentifully we have received of the Spirit of Christ, the more perfectly we are able to love them: and the more we love them the more we receive the Spirit. It is clear, however, that since we love them by the Spirit Who is given to us by Jesus, it is Jesus Himself Who loves them in us.”

“By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet. ”

“What a revelation it was, to discover so many ordinary people in a place together, more conscious of God than of one another: not there to show off their hats or their clothes, but to pray, or at least to fulfill a religious obligation, not a human one. For even those who might have been there for no better motive than that they were obliged to be, were at least free from any of the self-conscious and human constraint which is never absent from a Protestant church where people are definitely gathered together as people, as neighbors, and always have at least half an eye for one another, if not all of both eyes.”

“Our thought should not merely be an answer to what someone else has just said. Or what someone else might have said. Our interior world must be more than an echo of the words of someone else. There is no point in being a moon to somebody else's sun, still less is there any justification for our being moons of one another, and hence darkness to one another, not one of us being a true sun.”

“Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.”