The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties anymore.

Democracies cannot dispense with hypocrisy any more than dictatorships can with cynicism.

It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so

More often than not, nothingness is reluctantly and despairingly taken to be the only hypothesis possible when all the others have failed, since by definition it cannot be disproven and is beyond the scope of reason.

Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of humanity; or rather, at the very source of its life! To confound this lust in man with t hat desire which unites the sexes is like confusing a tumor with the very organ which it devours, a tumor whose very deformity horribly reproduces the shape.

Hell, madam, is to love no longer.

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it.

I realize now that friendship can break out between two people, with that sudden violence which is only attributed to the revelation of love.

I don’t think we can ever learn much from ultra-sensitive, shifty faces, skilled in disguise, that hide themselves in lust, as beasts hide to die.

The work God carries out in us,′ he said after a short pause, ‘is not often what we expect. A great deal of the time the Holy Spirit seems to be working backward in us and wasting time. If a lump of iron could form an idea of the file that’s slowly rough-shaping it, how furious it would be! Yet that’s how God shapes us. Certain saints’ lives seem horribly monotonous and desolate.