Quote collection
374 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits - and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful."
"There is only one fault, only one: our inability to feed upon light."
"If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire."
"A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not."
"The virtue of hope is an orientation of the soul towards a transformation after which it will be wholly and exclusively love."
"Everybody knows that really intimate conversation is only possible between two or three. As soon as there are six or seven, collective language begins to dominate. That is why it is a complete misinterpretation to apply to the Church the words 'Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.' Christ did not say two hundred, or fifty, or ten. He said two or three."
"Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement."
"To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is."
"I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded."
"The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle between innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who do not know what to conserve."
"Necessity is God's veil."
"In reality nothing is so beautiful as the good, nothing is so monotonous and boring as evil."
"Time's violence rends the soul, by the rent eternity enters."
"Expectant waiting is the foundation of the spiritual life."
"Every atheist is an idolater- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters."
"There is an easiness in salvation which is more difficult to us than all our efforts."
"The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul."
"Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it."
"Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures."
"A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it."