A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.

I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.

Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.