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

God's love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God's love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.

The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors.

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

The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.

When an apprentice gets hurt, or complains of being tired, the workmen and peasants have this fine expression: "It is the trade entering his body." Each time that we have some pain to go through, we can say to ourselves quite truly that it is the universe, the order and beauty of the world, and the obedience of God that are entering our body.

In this world, only those people who have fallen to the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, who are not just without any social consideration but are regarded by all as being deprived of that foremost human dignity, reason itself - only those people, in fact, are capable of telling the truth. All the others lie.