It is not enough to have perceived such a notion, given it one’s attention, understood it; it must be given a permanent place in the mind, so that it may be present even when one’s attention is directed toward something else.
You could not have wished to be born at a better time than this, when everything is lost.
It sometimes happens that a thought, either formulated to oneself or not formulated at all, works secretly on the mind and yet has but little direct influence over it.
If the middle classes haven’t the same need of an apocalypse, it is because long rows of figures have a poetry, a prestige which tempers in some sort the boredom associated with money; whereas, when money is counted in sixpences, we have boredom in its pure, unadulterated state. Nevertheless, that taste shown by bourgeois, both great and small, for Fascism, indicates that, in spite of everything, they too can feel bored.
All sins are attempts to fill voids.” because we cannot stand the God-shaped hole inside or us and we try stuffing it full of all sorts of things, but only God may fill it.
God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our flesh. But he can be almost perfectly absent from us in extreme affliction. This is the only possibility of perfection for us on earth. That is why the Cross is our only hope.
Yet what is impossible in logic becomes true in life, and the contradiction lodged within the soul tears it to shreds.
I have never caused anyone to weep. I have never spoken with a haughty voice. I have never made anyone afraid. I have never been deaf to words of justice and truth.
On God’s part creation is not an act of self-expansion but of restraint and renunciation.
Yes, we are dreaming. Men of action and enterprise are dreamers; they prefer dream to reality. But they use arms to make others dream their dreams. The victor lives his dream; the vanquished lives another’s dream.
Science is a monopoly, not because public education is badly organized, but by its very nature; non-scientists have access only to the results, not to the methods, that is to say they can only believe, not assimilate.
To love purely is to consent to distance.
Society is the cave. The way out is solitude.
I feel that it is necessary and ordained that I should be alone, a stranger and an exile in relation to every human circle, without exception.
When water is set in motion by a violent, impetuous current, it ceases to reflect images. Its surface is no longer level; it can no more measure densities. Whether it is moved by a single current or by several conflicting ones, the disturbance is the same.
Thus it happens that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.
Friendship is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, and without coming any nearer, the very being who is necessary to him as food. It requires the strength of soul that Eve did not have; and yet she had no need of the fruit. If she had been hungry at the moment she looked at the fruit, and if in spite of that she had remained looking at it indefinitely without taking one step toward it, she would have performed a miracle analogous to that of perfect friendship.
If we apply to the present the point of that desire within us which corresponds to finality, it pierces right through to the eternal.
We are living through a period bereft of a future. Waiting for that which is to come is no longer a matter of hope, but of anguish.
Human beings have roots by virtue of their real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape particular treasures of the past and particular expectations for the future.