Quote collection
374 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"In this world, only those people who have fallen to the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, who are not just without any social consideration but are regarded by all as being deprived of that foremost human dignity, reason itself - only those people, in fact, are capable of telling the truth. All the others lie."
"All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time."
"If someone does me injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil."
"Sin is nothing else but the failure to recognize human wretchedness."
"All those who possess in its pure state the love of their neighbour and the acceptance of the order of the world, inclucing affliction-all those, even should they live and die to all appearances atheists, are surely saved."
"If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without knowing or feeling it, this apparent barren affort has brought more light into the soul."
"Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual."
"All the goods of this world...are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire that perpetually burns within us for an infinite and perfect good."
"Official history is believing the murderers at their word."
"It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste."
"Our patriotism comes straight from the Romans. This is why French children are encouraged to seek inspiration for it in Corneille. It is a pagan virtue, if these two words are compatible. The word pagan, when applied to Rome, early possesses the significance charged with horror which the early Christian controversialists gave it. The Romans really were an atheistic and idolatrous people; not idolatrous with regard to images made of stone or bronze, but idolatrous with regard to themselves. It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism."
"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."
"The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real."
"When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence."
"Death. An instantaneous state, without past or future. Indispensable for entering eternity."
"It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom."
"What hope is there for innocence if it is not recognized?"
"Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love andjustice."
"The demonstrable correlation of opposites is an image of the transcendental correlation of contradictories."
"One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love - to serve the loved one without his knowing it - is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism."