“We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words--and own passages that speak to us. (p. 41)”

“The more degrees of freedom there are in practice, the wider the discussion and debate can be.”

“Yet, standardization only leads to sameness, not necessarily quality, and rarely to excellence (p. 9).”

“Only when we can accept God as he is can we give up the desire for spiritual experiences that we can feel.”

“In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.”

“Our Christian destiny is, in fact, a great one: but we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. For our own idea of greatness is illusory, and if we pay too much attention to it we will be lured out of the peace and stability of the being God gave us, and seek to live in a myth we have created for ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.”

“We can only learn so much and live.”