“To ease another’s burden, help to carry it.”

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.

Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.

Action on the move creates its own route, creates to a very great extent the conditions under which it is to be fulfilled and thus baffles all calculation.

We regard intelligence as man’s main characteristic and we know that there is no superiority which intelligence cannot confer on us, no inferiority for which it cannot compensate.

There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter.

One can always reason with reason.

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.

When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories.

However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.

If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; but oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime.

No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear.

God will not place a burden on a man’s shoulders knowing that he cannot carry it.

Worse than a true evil is it to bear the burden of faults that are not truly yours.

Go and show love to everyone, because your life is a precious mission: it is not a burden to be borne, but a gift to offer.

Create a society at peace with itself, and lay down the burden of hate and division.

To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.