Fire destroys that which feeds it.
A work of art has an author and yet when it is perfect it has something which is anonymous about it.
Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.
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...
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...
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...
To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.
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.
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.
Today Relative to Yesterday or Tomorrow The future is made of the same stuff as the present.
In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
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...
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.
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.
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.
An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.
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.
There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the re...
Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.