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...
To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.
To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.
Fire destroys that which feeds it.
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...
Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.
Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.
We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.
Today Relative to Yesterday or Tomorrow The future is made of the same stuff as the present.
Herein is a capital truth. It is not the natural capacity, the congenital gift, nor is it the effort, the will, the work, which in the intelligence as sway over the energy capable of making it fully e...
If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilize...
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.
The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.
A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.
Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscio...
Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.
A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.