To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.

It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed.

It is grace that forms the void inside us and it is grace that can fill the void.

There are only two sorts of greatness: true greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old, old lie of world conquest. Conquest is an ersatz greatness.

It is only from the light which streams constantly from heaven that a tree can derive the energy to strike its roots deep into the soil. The tree is in fact rooted in the sky.