How, then, find the courage for action? By slipping a little into unconsciousness, spontaneity, instinct which holds one to the earth and dictates the relatively good and useful. By accepting the human condition more simply, and candidly, by dreading troubles less, calculating less, hoping more.
I do not deny the rights of democracy, but I have no illusions as to the uses that will be made of those rights so long as wisdom is rare and pride abundant.
To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned, and sustained by a supreme power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be – in order with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm.
We only understand that which already is within us.
The philosopher aspires to explain away all mysteries, to dissolve them into light. Mystery, on the other hand, is demanded and pursued by the religious instinct; mystery constitutes the essence of worship.
At bottom, everything depends upon the presence or absence of one single element in the soul – HOPE.
Religion is not a method, it is a life, a higher and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits; a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which overflows.
Order means light and peace, inward liberty and free command over one’s self; order is power.
Order is man’s greatest need, and his true well-being.
Latent genius is but a presumption. Everything that can be, is bound to come into being, and what never comes into being is nothing.
Never to tire, never to grow cold; to be patient, sympathetic, tender; to look for the budding flower and the opening heart; to hope always; like God, to love always – this is duty.
Man is saved by love and duty, and by the hope that springs from duty, or rather from the moral facts of consciousness, as a flower springs from the soil.
Sympathy is the first condition of criticism; reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion.
Doubt is the accomplice of tyranny.
Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or demonstrated – it is an art.
Before giving advice we must have secured its acceptance, or, rather, have made it desired.
The spirit of sarcasm lives and thrives in the midst of universal wreck; its balls are enchanted and itself invulnerable, and it braves retaliations and reprisals because itself is a mere flash, a bodiless and magical nothing.
Man is a passion which brings a will into play, which works an intelligence.
To depersonalize man is the dominant drift of our times.
There are 2 sorts of pride: one in which we approve others, the other in which we cannot accept ourselves.