Fire destroys that which feeds it.
How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.
On reaching a certain degree of pain we lose the world.
It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls to despair at the first onslaught of affliction.
A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it.
The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.
He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.
A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.
Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.
One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.
We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.
Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.
At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done.
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.
More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.
No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope.
It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures.