Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

"In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention."

"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."

"The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard."

"The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade."

"Purity is the power to contemplate defilement."

"Pain is the root of knowledge"

"The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting."

"There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice."

"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 we are amusing ourselves with lies."

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life"

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

"Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it."

"There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul."

"Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just."

"Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?"

"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."

"The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil."

"Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure."

"I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her."

"Every perfect life is a parable invented by God."

"To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile."

"The most important part of teaching; to teach what it is to know."

"In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention."

"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."

"Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge."

"Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty."

"In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs."

"There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too."

"One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights."

"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul."

"A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams."

"Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission."

"It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures."

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

"With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed."

"To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life."

"Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand."

"Humility is attentive patience."

"Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication."

"If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else."

"I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances."

"Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought."

"A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless."

"For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation."

"All sins are attempts to fill voids."

"The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest."

"We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him."

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

"Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison."