Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.

Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.

Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.

People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.

We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious.

There is perhaps no better way of measuring the natural endowment of a soul than by its ability to transmute dissatisfaction into a creative impulse.