Ideas become powerful only if they appear in the flesh; an idea which does not lead to action by the individual and by groups remains at best a paragraph or a footnote in a book.
Once they are through the process of education, most people lose the capacity of wondering, of being surprised. They feel they ought to know everything, and hence that it is a sign of ignorance to be surprised or puzzled by anything.
Exclusive love is a contradiction in itself.
Freedom is the fundamental condition for any growth.
Mobilizing the love of life is the only force that can defeat the love for the dead.
Love is active penetration of the other person, in which my desire to know is stilled by union. In the act of fusion I know you, I know myself, I know everybody – and I “know” nothing.
The root of the word education is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something which is potentially present.
Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them.
The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person whose aims the businessman is interested to satisfy.
It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides.
When the theory of evolution destroyed the picture of God as the supreme Creator, confidence in God as the all-powerful Father of man fell with it, although many were able to combine a belief in God with the acceptance of the Darwinian theory.
There are many who feel consciously hopeful and unconsciously hopeless, and there are few for whom it is the other way around.
It seems that great minds a hundred years ago saw what would happen today or tomorrow, while we to whom it is happening blind ourselves in order not to be disturbed in our daily routine.
Death is never sweet, not even if it is suffered for the highest ideal.
Faith is not a weak form of belief or knowledge; it is not faith in this or that; faith is the conviction about the not yet proven, the knowledge of the real possibility, the awareness of pregnancy.
The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event.
Modern man’s happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments.
When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism.
Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.
The hoarders, who are anxiously worried about losing something, are, psychologically speaking, the poor impoverished people, regardless of how much they have. Whoever is capable of giving of themselves is rich.