The first ministers were the twelve disciples. There is no evidence that Jesus chose them because they are brighter or nicer than other people. Their sole qualification seems to have been their initial willingness to rise to their feet when Jesus said, Follow me.

I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human.

The world needs people who save lives.

The story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.

The other day, the way people do who are approaching their 80th birthday, I was thinking about all the last business -- funerals and where do you want to be buried -- and I thought if anything were to be inscribed on my tombstone, I said let it be that.

Becoming a Christian was terribly helpful to me. I can't imagine finding my way without it. I think it can be very crucially important to ally yourself with some religion.

You use your real voice with those you love, and you cannot be phony with those who know you well.

Words have the power to make things happen.

Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are.

Here and there even in our world, and now and then, even in ourselves, we catch glimpeses of a New Creation, which, fleeting as those glipmses are apt to be, give us hope both for this life and for whatever life may await us later on.

Avarice, greed, concupiscence and so forth are all based on the mathematical truism that the more you get, the more you have. The remark of that it is more blessed to give than to receive is based on the human truth that the more you give away in love, the more you are. It is not just for the sake of other people that tells us to give rather than get, but for our own sakes too.

Maybe at the heart of all our traveling is the dream of someday, somehow, getting Home.

Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.

In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.

The faces we lose track of most easily are the faces of the people who are closest to us, the people we love the most whose faces we see so often that we can't really see them anymore.

People are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them. They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

If you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants-in-the-pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.

We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.

Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed.

If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell it.