In the fairy tale, an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten and cities perish. A lamp is lit and love flies away. An apple is eaten and the hope of God is gone.

I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do— I can die.

When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.

Somehow one can never manage to be an atheist.

Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards.

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.