Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.

Hope is a risk that must be run.

When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears?

God ordains that beggars should beg for greatness, as for all else, when greatness shines out of them, and they don't know it.

...the most dangerous shortsightedness consists in underestimating the mediocre.

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

And what have you laymen made of hell? A kind of penal servitude for eternity, on the lines of your convict prisons on earth, to which you condemn in advance all the wretched felons your police have hunted from the beginning - enemies of society, as you call them. You're kind enough to include the blasphemers and the profane. What proud or reasonable man could stomach such a notion of God's justice? And when you find that notion inconvenient it's easy enough for you to put it on one side. Hell is not to love any more, Madame. Not to love any more!