I have an old Word document where, from time to time, I record interesting quotes that I have encountered here and there. I thought it might be fun to share some of them here, and maybe invite people to respond to the post with some of their own favorite quotes.

“The whole compact mass of created being and essence and the everyday world we are so familiar with sails like a ship over the fathomless depths of a wholly different element, the only one that is absolute and determining, the boundless love of the Father”  – Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” – Frederick Buechner, Now and Then

“This is the root of what the saints called compunction: the grief, the anguish of being helpless to be anything but what you were not meant to be. . . . And yet, strangely, it is in this helplessness that we come upon the beginning of joy. We discover that as long as we stay still the pain is not so bad and there is even a certain peace, a certain richness, a certain strength, a certain companionship that makes itself present to us when we are beaten down and lie flat with our mouths in the dust, hoping for hope.”  – Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

“For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet  

“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 ”Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things . . . as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.” - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“Someday, after we have mastered the winds and the waves, the tides and gravity, we will harness the energies of love. And, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin