If we miss contentment, then that is often our own fault—and the fault not of our bodies but of our souls.

We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.

We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.

Selfishness and greed, individual or national, cause most of our troubles.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

I've come to the realization that a lot of our problems are because of a dearth of spiritual values.

What can we sell them? Not our soul.

But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy.

So often we fail to acknowledge what we have because we’re so concerned about what we want.

It is not the sale of my soul that troubles me: I have sold it too often to care about that. I have sold it for a professorship. I have sold it for an income. ... What is all human conduct but the daily and hourly sale of our souls for trifles?

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

Our puny sentimentalism has caused us to forget that a human life is sacred only when it may be of some use to itself and to the world.

All afflictions are based on selfishness. That is why we have so much anger and so many troubles. (p. 33)

The difficulties in economic life arise mainly because men forget divine power,,