“It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls to despair at the first onslaught of affliction.”

If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice of how he acts when he loses money.

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.

The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.

Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.

It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.

A man thinks he is dying for his country,” said Anatole France, “but he is dying for a few industrialists.” But even that is saying too much. What one dies for is not even so substantial and tangible as an industrialist.

I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.

For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation.

Love is not consolation, it is light.

God is rich in mercy. I know this wealth of his with the certainty of experience, I have touched it.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

The beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter.

The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.

The fact that different cultures have different practices no more refutes [moral] objectivism than the fact that water flows in different directions in different places refutes the law of gravity.

In every storm you were the lighthouse, the direction in which to swim. so i grew strong a good swimmer and made it to your rocky shores.

Anything that’s not positive, I don’t have the energy to focus on it. Anything that’s not going in the right direction, I don’t have the time or the energy.

If I don’t book a job, I like to see it not as a rejection but as a redirection to something different.

The path to peace starts with one step in the right direction.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions.

Energy can’t be created or destroyed, and energy flows. It must be in a direction, with some kind of internal, emotive, spiritual direction.

Learn to live between effort and surrender. Do your best and hope for what you want, but do not resist the direction of the wind.⁠