One must require from each one the duty which each one can perform. Accepted authority rests first of all on reason.
He had taken seriously words which were without importance, and it made him very unhappy.
One only really sees with the heart.
What he had yearned to embrace was not the flesh but a down spirit, a spark, the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.
That’s the way they are. You must not hold it against them. Children should be very understanding of grown-ups.
Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, which is to be what one is and no other.
Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living.
True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.
If it is true that wars are won by believers, it is also true that peace treaties are sometimes signed by businessmen.
For there is but one problem – the problem of human relations. We forget that there is no hope or joy except in human relations.
Sometimes, there is no harm in putting off a piece of work until another day.
An administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on.
The flower you single out is a rejection of all other flowers; nevertheless, only on these terms is it beautiful.
Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
Peace dies when the framework is ripped apart. When there is no longer a place that is yours in the world. When you know no longer where your friend is to be found.
We don’t ask to be eternal beings. We only ask that things do not lose all their meaning.
In giving you are throwing a bridge across the chasm of your solitude.
The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.
Mad is the man who is forever gritting his teeth against that granite block, complete and changeless, of the past.
Sometimes we behave as though there was something more important than life. But what?