“Love: To feel with one’s whole self the existence of another being.”

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Expectant waiting is the foundation of the spiritual life.

At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.

Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.

Religion as a source of consolation is an obstacle to true faith.

Fortunately the sky is beautiful everywhere.

Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty.

In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

It is not through the way in which someone speaks about God that I can see whether that person has passed through the crucible of Divine Love, but through the way the person speaks to me about things here on earth.

Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.

Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.

Only within metaphysics does logic exist.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

But I must at the very beginning lay down this principle – friendship can only exist between good men.

Being is essentially different from a being, from beings.

The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.

Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence.

The question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself.