This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.

A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.

Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.

I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live.

The best revenge you can have on intellectuals is to be madly happy.

Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn't come in contact with death; that's why he can speak with such assurance of the truth-with a capital T. But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He'd try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its goodness.