To be innocent is to bear the weight of the entire universe. It is to throw away the counterweight.
Fortunately the sky is beautiful everywhere.
There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.
A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.
As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.
We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
It is impossible that the whole of truth should not be present at every time and every place, available for anyone who desires it.
War, which perpetuates itself under the form of preparation for war, has once and for all given the State an important role in production.
It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom.
Necessity is God’s veil.
Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other.
We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.
Only an indirect method is effective. We do nothing if we have not first drawn back.
A well ordered society would be one where the State only had a negative action, comparable to that of a rudder: a light pressure at the right moment to counteract the first suggestion of any loss of equilibrium.
What hope is there for innocence if it is not recognized?
Death. An instantaneous state, without past or future. Indispensable for entering eternity.
One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us, and it is either directed somewhere into this world, or into another.
In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
Today it is not nearly enough to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent.