Only yesterday I was full of worldly fancies, although religion had already some share in my thoughts: glory was still my daydream. Today my hopes are higher, and I covet here below nothing but obscurity and peace.

In relations between the rich and the strong, between the rich and the poor, between the master and the servant, it's liberty that grinds down, and the law which liberates.

After speech, silence is the greatest power in the world.

Turn your eyes whither you will, enter into whatever temple you please, you will find there on the very threshold Prophecy and Sacrament .... whoever despises these two things, infallibly bends towards earth, knowing nothing of God but his name, and holding with him no other relations than ingratitude and forgetfulness.

Like every man who appears at an epoch which is historical and rendered famous by his works, Jesus Christ has a history, a history which the church and the world possess, and which, surrounded by countless memorials, has at least the same authenticity as any other history formed in the same countries, amidst the same peoples and in the same times. As, then, if I would study the lives of Brutus and Cassius, I should calmly open Plutarch, I open the Gospel to study Jesus Christ, and I do so with the same composure.

For Christians, the first of books is the Gospel and the Rosary is actually the abridgement of the Gospel.

Whilst no people appears in history without the sign and palladium of a positive faith, without temple, altar, priesthood--that is to say, without a constituted religion--unbelief appears only under an individual form, sometimes proscribed, sometimes tolerated, seldom powerful, and never becoming established as the public and social expression of a nation.