Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms...
To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
Contemplating an object fixedly with the mind, asking myself, ‘What is it?’ without thinking of any other object or relating it to anything else for hours on end.
The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship.
Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just.
One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love – to serve the loved one without his knowing it – is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.
Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?
The real stumbling-block of totalitarian regimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men’s inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth.
The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.
We can only know one thing about God – that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.
Beauty is a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it.
Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.
Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love andjustice.
The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.
Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.
A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.
Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad, the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.
There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one’s intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.
We must wish either for that which actually exists or for that which cannot in any way exist or, still better, for both. That which is and that which cannot be are both outside the realm of becoming.
Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.