When you think of the huge uninterrupted success of a book like Don Quixote, you're bound to realize that if humankind have not yet finished being revenged, by sheer laughter, for being let down in their greatest hope, it is because that hope was cherished so long and lay so deep!

Purity is not imposed upon us as though it were a kind of punishment, it is one of those mysterious but obvious conditions of that supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine, which we speak of as faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge, it slays our need for it.

Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice?

Faith is not a thing which one loses, we merely cease to shape our lives by it.

The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more.

Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.

But I shall give less thought to the future, I shall work in the present. I feel such work is within my power. For I only succeed in small things, and when I am tried by anxiety, I am bound to say it is the small joys that release me.