“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.”

Contradiction is the lever of transcendence.

Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.

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

To die for God is not a proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is a proof of faith in God.

Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.

The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.

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

One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us, and it is either directed somewhere into this world, or into another.

There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.

Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement.

The world is God’s language to us.

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.