There is no greater joy for me than looking at the sky on a clear night with an attention so concentrated that all my other thoughts disappear; then one can think that the stars enter into one's soul.
Religion as a source of consolation is an obstacle to true faith.
The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.
Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.
Attentiveness is the heart of prayer.
There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.
Prayer consists simply in giving to God all the careful attention of which the soul is capable.
The virtue of hope is an orientation of the soul towards a transformation after which it will be wholly and exclusively love.
In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics when it is especially an act of internal politics and the most atrocious act of all . . . Since the directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death-the war of one state against another state resolves itself into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own people.
The villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty.
It is not through the way in which someone speaks about God that I can see whether that person has passed through the crucible of Divine Love, but through the way the person speaks to me about things here on earth.
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 void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.
Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement.
If there were no affliction in this world we might think we were in paradise.
Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the "I" from the outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves.
The right to kill: supposing the life of X ... were linked with our own so that the two deaths had to be simultaneous, should we still wish him to die? If with our whole body and soul we desire life and if nevertheless without lying, we can reply 'yes'> then we have the right to kill.
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.
Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love andjustice.
Renunciation is submission to time.
All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.
When we hit a nail with a hammer, the whole of the shock received by the large head of the nail passes into the point without any of it being lost, although it is only a point. If the hammer and the head of the nail were infinitely big it would be just the same. The point of the nail would transmit this infinite shock at the point to which it was applied. Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of soul and social degradation, all at the same time, constitutes the nail. The point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity, spreading throughout space and time.
The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
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 destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
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