“Fortunately the sky is beautiful everywhere.”

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.

True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, “What are you going through?

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.

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.

Anything forced is not beautiful.

Nature is beautiful because it looks like Art; and Art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as Art while yet it looks like Nature.

Beauty is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealment.

Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living – and the Ideal shames us all.

Look closely. The beautiful may be small.

When I spoke of “beauty”, I was thinking of Rilke’s notion that the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrible, and of Hölderlin’s idea that the beautiful can unite extreme opposites in intimacy.

Beauty presents an indeterminate concept of Understanding, the sublime an indeterminate concept of Reason.

Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful, and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.