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.
The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.
When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.
Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.
Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.
Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.
A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.
In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.
There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.
Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.
The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.
A mind enclosed in language is in prison.
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 civilized Europe.
One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.
There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.
To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
