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

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

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...

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,...

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...

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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...

Love is not consolation. It is light.

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...

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

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...

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...

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.

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.

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

This landscape is ugly.

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

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

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...

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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...

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,...

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...

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.