Joy is being fully aware of reality...
The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors.
Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.
A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.
We cannot take a single step toward heaven. It is not in our power to travel in a vertical direction. If however we look heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up.
Modern life is given over to immoderation. Immoderation invades everything: actions and thought, public and private life.
The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.
If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one’s own damnation whilst in disobeying him one could be saved, I should still choose the way of obedience.
The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.
The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds...
Every atheist is an idolater- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.
The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.
The children of God should not have any other country here below but the universe itself, with the totality of all the reasoning creatures it ever has contained, contains, or ever will contain. That is the native city to which we owe our love.
The word ‘revolution’ is a word for which you kill, for which you die, for which you send the labouring masses to their deaths; but which does not contain any content.
The role of the intelligence – that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.
To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
The soul is the human being considered as having a value in itself.
School children and students who love God should never say: “For my part I like mathematics”; “I like French”; “I like Greek.” They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.
Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.
The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it.