If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers.

The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.

She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her.

True artists scorn nothing.

To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.

My great idea is that we must forgive the Pope. First of all, he needs it more than anyone else. Besides, it is the only way of placing oneself above him.

Believe me, the hardest thing for a man to give up is that which he really doesn't want, after all.