And yet with every wound You robbed me of a crime,And as each blow was paid with Blood,You paid me also each great sin with greater graces.For even as I killed You,You made Yourself a greater thief than any in Your company,Stealing my sins into Your dying life,Robbing me even of my death.

The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.

There are different kinds of fear. One of the most terrible is the sensation that you are likely to become, at any moment, the protagonist in a Graham Greene novel: the man who tries to be virtuous and who is, in a certain sense, holy, and yet who is overwhelmed by sin as if there were a kind of fatality about it.

God has left sin in the world in order that there may be forgiveness: not only the secret forgiveness by which He Himself cleanses our souls, but the manifest forgiveness by which we have mercy on one another and so give expression to the fact that He is living, by His mercy, in our own hearts.

The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth.