Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
Modern life is given over to immoderation. Immoderation invades everything: actions and thought, public and private life.
There is an easiness in salvation which is more difficult to us than all our efforts.
Compassion directed to oneself is humility.
We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us.
We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.
It seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.
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.
We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me.
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.
The Hebrews took for their idol, not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, something just as earthly. Their religion is essentially inseparable from such idolatry, because of the notion of the 'chosen people'.
He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.
Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
Sin is nothing else but the failure to recognize human wretchedness.
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.
In a general way, the literature of the twentieth century is essentially psychological; and psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man.
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.
A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it.
In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors.
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.
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.
Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures.
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