Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.

Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.

Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.

At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

As for the spirit of poverty, I do not remember any moment when it was not in me, although only to that unhappily small extent compatible with my imperfection. I fell in love with Saint Francis of Assisi as soon as I came to know about him. I always believed and hoped that one day Fate would force upon me the condition of a vagabond and a beggar which he embraced freely. Actually I felt the same way about prison.

A well ordered society would be one where the State only had a negative action, comparable to that of a rudder: a light pressure at the right moment to counteract the first suggestion of any loss of equilibrium.