We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we once were, to what we wished to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death is to alter us more completely than the changes that occur in the course of our lives, if in that other life we were to encounter the self that we have been, we should turn away from ourselves as from those people with whom we were once on friendly terms but whom we have not seen for years… We dream much of a paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too.

We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.

You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this:
“Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.”
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.

count it the greatest of all sins to prefer life to honour, and to lose, for the sake of living, all that makes life worth having.

There is not love of life without despair about life.

Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.

Sin, sin! To rid myself of boredom by committing a crime, to break up monotony by deceiving. To sin in order to be a new person, another person. To hate life worse than it hated me. To sin so as not to die.

Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life

If not for death would we appreciate life?

Sometimes we behave as though there was something more important than life. But what?

I start from the position that every human endeavor is flawed: if we were to discard everything that is flawed there would be nothing left. We must therefore make the most of what we have; the alternative is to embrace death. The choice is a real one, because death can be embraced in a number of ways; the pursuit of perfection and eternity in all its manifestations is equivalent to choosing the idea of death over the idea of life. If we carry this line of argument to its logical conclusion, the meaning of life consists of the flaws in one's conceptions and what one does about them. Life can be seen as a fertile fallacy.

The real malady is fear of life, not of death

Where is the Life we lost in living?

The danger facing all of us — let me say it again, for one feels it tremendously — is not that we shall make an absolute failure of life, nor that we shall fall into outright viciousness, nor that we shall be terribly unhappy, nor that we shall feel that life has no meaning at all — not these things. The danger is that we may fail to perceive life's greatest meaning, fall short of its highest good, miss its deepest and most abiding happiness, be unable to render the most needed service, be unconscious of life ablaze with the light of the Presence of God — and be content to have it so — that is the danger. That some day we may wake up and find that always we have been busy with the husks and trappings of life — and have really missed life itself. For life without God, to one who has known the richness and joy of life with Him, is unthinkable, impossible. That is what one prays one's friends may be spared — satisfaction with a life that falls short of the best, that has in it no tingle and thrill which come from a friendship with the Father.