Nothing is necessary except God, and nothing is less necessary than pain.

What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution.

Christianity was preached by ignorant men and believed by servants, and that is why it resembles nothing ever known.

In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.

We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place.

It can even come about that a created will cancels out, not perhaps the exertion, but the result of divine action; for in this sense, God himself has told us that God wishes things which do not happen because man does not wish them! Thus the rights of men are immense, and his greatest misfortune is to be unaware of them.

Reason speaks in words alone, but love has a song.