We should desire neither the immortality nor the death of any human being, whoever he may be, with whom we have to do.
Patriotism is idolatry of the self.
The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.
The contradictions the mind comes up against, these are the only realities, the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity.
The feeding of those that are hungry is a form of contemplation.
In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it.
Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.
The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who coordinate...
It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.
Nothing is less instructive than a machine.
We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing...
All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.
An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it neither higher nor lower.
Attentiveness is the heart of prayer.
Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the “I” from the outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves.
In order to obey God, one must receive his commands. How did it happen that I received them in adolescence, while I was professing atheism? To believe that the desire for good is always fulfilled – that is faith, and whoever has it is not an atheist.
Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive.
Prayer consists simply in giving to God all the careful attention of which the soul is capable.
We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in the apprenticeship to virtue.