God is the friend of silence. See how nature -- trees, flowers, grass -- grow in silence; see the stars, the moon, the sun, how they move in silence... The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life. We need silence to be able to touch souls. The essential thing is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us. All our words will be useless unless they come from within.
As Aldous Huxley wrote: "There isn't any formula or method. You learn by loving." But sometimes, if we're lucky, we live long enough to grow into it in such a way that because of it we come to recognize the value of life. . . . We learn enough about love to allow things to slip away and ourselves to melt into the God whose love made all of it possible. . . . Sometimes we live long enough to see the face of God in another. Then, in that case, we have loved.