Every being cries out in silence to be read differently. Do not be indifferent to these cries.
It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.
Justice consists in seeing that no harm is done to men. Whenever a man cries inwardly: ‘Why am I being hurt?’ harm is being done to him. He is often mistaken when he tries to define the harm, and why and by whom it is being inflicted on him. But the cry itself is infallible.
It is only from the light which streams constantly from heaven that a tree can derive the energy to strike its roots deep into the soil. The tree is in fact rooted in the sky.
A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.
Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures.
The villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty...
Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.
The whole evolution of present-day society tends to develop the various forms of bureaucratic oppression and to give them a sort of autonomy in regard to capitalism as such.
You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.
In this world we live in a mixture of time and eternity. Hell would be pure time.
The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities.
Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry.
Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.
For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation.
God’s love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God’s love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.
Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.
Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.