The authentic and pure values, truth, beauty, and goodness, in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object. Teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training the attention, for the possibility of such an act. All the other advantages of instruction are without interest.

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

The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

The feeding of those that are hungry is a form of contemplation.

A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done