When one reaches absolute power, one loses total contact with reality.

Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.

A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.

Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned.

The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.

For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

What Uncle Leo XIII never suspected was that his nephew's courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break.