“There is only one fault, only one: our inability to feed upon light.”

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.

We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.

Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.

It is only from the light which streams constantly from heaven that a tree can derive the energy to strike its roots deep into the soil. The tree is in fact rooted in the sky.

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

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.

The virtue of hope is an orientation of the soul towards a transformation after which it will be wholly and exclusively love.

Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.

War is the supreme form of prestige.

Prayer consists simply in giving to God all the careful attention of which the soul is capable.

God’s love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God’s love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.

Sometimes I think that a parody of democracy could be more dangerous than a blatant dictatorship, because that gives people an opportunity to avoid doing anything about it.

I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

No nation, savage or civilized, save only the United States of America, has confessed its inability to protect its women save by hanging, shooting, and burning alleged offenders

Old people love to give good advice; it compensates them for their inability to set a bad example.

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.

I am pissed off at your insensitive inability to understand why I’m pissed off in the first place.