The sense of the joy in anything is the sense of Christ.

We are the mediocre, we are the half givers, we are the half lovers, we are the savourless salt. Break the hard crust of complacency. Quicken in us the sharp grace of desire.

Every ordinary thing in your life is a word of God's love: your home, your work, the clothes you wear, the air you breathe, the food you eat.... the flowers under your feet are the courtesy of God's heart flung down on You! All these things say one thing only: See how I love you.

God speaks silently, God speaks in your heart if your heart is noisy, chattering, you will not hear.

Powerful to alleviate, to delay, to camouflage, though money is, in the end it lets us down.

Advent is the season of the secret, the secret of the growth of Christ, of divine love growing in silence…For nine months, Christ grew in his mother's body. By his own will, she formed him from herself, from the simplicity of her daily life.

Sometimes it may seem to us that there is no purpose in our lives, that going day after day for years to this office or that school or factory is nothing else but waste and weariness. But it may be that God has sent us there because but for us, Christ would not be there. If our being there means that Christ is there, that alone makes it worthwhile.

God is everywhere: yes, but how dim faith is, what a remote idea heaven is, in the modern world!

Most people know the sheer wonder that goes with falling in love, how not only does everything in heaven and earth become new, but the lover himself becomes new. It is literally like the sap rising in the tree, putting forth new green shoots of life.

The way to begin healing the wounds of the world is to treasure the Infant Christ in us to be not the castle but the cradle of Christ and, in rocking that cradle to the rhythm of love, to swing the whole world back into the beat of the Music of Eternal Life.

It is part of God's plan for us that Christ shall come to us in everyone it is in their particular role that we must learn to know him. He may come as a little child, making enormous demands, giving enormous consolation. He may come as a stranger, so that we must give the hospitality to a stranger that we should like to give to Christ.

The love for material things grows like a fungus in the soul and destroys the loveliness of the human heart utterly.

I often think that the ideal of our perfection that we set up, and often go through torture to achieve, may not be God's idea of how He wants us to be at all. That may be something quite different that we never would have thought of, and what seems like a failure to us may really be something bringing us closer to His will for us.