Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and...

It is to the prodigals…that the memory of their Father’s house comes back. If the son had lived economically he would never have thought of returning.

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because...

God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This...

It is because the will has no power to bring about salvation that the idea of secular morality is an absurdity. What is called morality only depends on the will in what is, so to speak, its most muscular aspect. Religion on the contrary corresponds to desire, and it is desire that saves…To long for...

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 effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider...

Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

Art has no immediate future because all art is collective and there is no more collective life(there are only dead collections of people), and also because of this breaking of the true pact between the body and the soul. Greek art coincided with the beginning of geometry and with athleticism, the art of the Middle...

There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.

Love is not consolation. It is light.

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.

When I think of the Crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy.

One must always be prepared to switch sides with justice, that fugitive of the winning camp.

If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale … we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, ‘that fugitive from the camp of conquerors’.

Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.

If three steps are taken without any other motive than the desire to obey God, those three steps are miraculous; they are equally so whether they take place on dry land or on water.

La beauté séduit la chair pour obtenir la permission de passer jusqu’à l’ me.

In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything except that he does not exist, since we have not reached the point where God exists.

At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. These thoughts are outside language, they are unformulable, although they are perfectly rigorous...

This landscape is ugly.

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling...

The sum of the particular intentions of God is the universe itself.

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.

There isn’t a man on earth who doesn’t at times pronounce an opinion on good and evil, even if it be only to find fault with somebody else.

Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.

We are drawn towards a thing, either because there is some good we are seeking from it, or because we cannot do without it. Sometimes the two motives coincide. Often however they do not. Each is distinct and quite independent. We eat distasteful food, if we have nothing else, because we cannot do otherwise. A...

The danger is not that the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but that, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.

Education — whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people, or even oneself — consists in creating motives. To show what is beneficial, what is obligatory, what is good — that is the task of education. Education concerns itself with the motives for effective action. For no action is ever carried...