We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.

Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.

Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value, and its face of eternal youth.

... it is true that I do not respect [human life] more than I respect my own life. And if it is easy for me to kill, that is because it is difficult for me to die.