Distance is the soul of beauty.
There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.
It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me.
Religion as a source of consolation is an obstacle to true faith.
Contradiction is the lever of transcendence.
The only great spirit of our time.
Contradiction itself, far from always being a criterion of error, is sometimes a sign of truth.
Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.
Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.
The world is God’s language to us.
Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.
The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.
Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.
It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.
One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.
The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have the capacity do not possess it.
Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either.
Love: To feel with one’s whole self the existence of another being...