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.
If we forgive God for his crime against us, which is to have made us finite creatures, He will forgive our crime against him, which is that we are finite creatures.
To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.
Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
Time does us violence; it is the only violence.
Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.
Friendship is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, without coming any nearer, the very being who is as necessary to him as food.
True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.
The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul like pincers to catch hold of God.
The entire universe is nothing but a great metaphor.
Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.
The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.
Attachment is a manufacturer of illusion and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.
An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.
Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.
When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.
Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.
Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.
Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.