The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.
Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.
Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.
Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.
Pain is the root of knowledge.
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.
Those who serve a cause are not those who love that cause. They are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it - except in the case of the very purest and they are rare.
All sins are attempts to fill voids.
To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.
The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.
Fire destroys that which feeds it.
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
There is something in our soul that loathes true attention much more violently than flesh loathes fatigue. That something is much closer to evil than flesh is. That is why, every time we truly give ou...
It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.
One must always be prepared to switch sides with justice, that fugitive of the winning camp.
In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on...
At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which invol...
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.