One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.
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.
Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstacy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. With fictional good and evil it is the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm.
Truth lights up the soul in proportion to its purity, not in any sense to its quantity. It isn’t the quantity of metal which matters, but the degree of alloy. In this respect, a little pure gold is worth a lot of pure gold. A little pure truth is worth as much as a lot of pure truth. Similarly, one perfect Greek statue contains as much beauty as two perfect Greek statues.
Humility consists in knowing that in what we call ‘I’ there is no source of energy by which we can rise. Everything, without exception, that is of value in me comes from somewhere other than myself, not as a gift, but as a loan which must be ceaselessly renewed.
To see a landscape as it is when I am not there... When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.
Suffering: superiority of man over God. The Incarnation was necessary so that this superiority should not be scandalous.
All mediocrity flies from the light.
For the action of grace in our hearts is secret and silent.
Desire is impossible: it destroys its object. Lovers cannot be one, nor can Narcissus be two. Don Juan, Narcissus. Because to desire something is impossible, we have to desire what is nothing.
Piety in regard to the dead: to do everything for what does not exist.