Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

The children of God should not have any other country here below but the universe itself, with the totality of all the reasoning creatures it ever has contained, contains, or ever will contain. That is the native city to which we owe our love.

Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.

The real stumbling-block of totalitarian regimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men's inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth.

If there were no affliction in this world we might think we were in paradise.

On reaching a certain degree of pain we lose the world.

Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.