“Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.”
“A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.”
“The role of the intelligence --that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.”
“Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.”
“In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.”
“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.”
“A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.”
“Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.”
“There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.”
“It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.”
“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.”
“The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.”
“To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.”
“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.”
“Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.”
“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.”
“The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.”
“Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.”
“We can know only 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.”
“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.”
“Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.”
“Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.”
“To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.”
“When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.”
“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.”
“If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities.”