“Our day -- with its confusion and noise, its blurry, dark, and whirling pace - is much like a hurricane. The steadying voice is not found shouting above it all. Stability speaks in the quiet interior, "in the stillness" where prayer begins and the testimony of Christ is kept, that familiar chamber where we detect truth and where we chose to do the right thing.In that place of patient hearing, we find out what the Master would like us to do. There, we can avoid getting tangled in other things. There, we decide to do His short list of tasks. There, we resist adding to our marching orders, avoiding the tendency to dwarf His list with a longer list of our own.If we fail to listen in those depths, if we ignore the interior voice, if we indulge ourselves in self-appointed missions, we will soon complain that we have too many things to do. And then a hundred hours in a day will not be enough. The truth is, we don't need more time for doing things. We need more vision about what few things to do.”

“We all of us complain of the shortness of time, saith Seneca, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives, says he, are spent either in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do: we are always complaining our days are few, and acting as though there would no end of them."- On the Right Use of Time”

“There are things about ourselves that we need to get rid of; there are things we need to change. But at the same time, we do not need to be too desperate, too ruthless, too combative. Along the way to usefulness and happiness, many of those things will change themselves, and the others can be worked on as we go. The first thing we need to do is recognize and trust our own Inner Nature, and not lose sight of it.”

“People like us, we think differently, don't we? We are different. We do all the things that others do. But when it comes down to it, we don't need anyone else. We're happy doing what we do and having obligation interferes with that. And sometimes I think we don't even need ourselves. What's most important is to find out whether we're right or not.”

“Love is never easy. We begin by loving the things we can, according to our stature, but it is not long before we find that what we love is other than ourselves and that our love is no protection against being wounded. Do we then speak to dominate what we love, to make it bend to our will, to stop it from hurting us even though to do so is to betray love? And that is only where the difficulty begins..”

“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.”