Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

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

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

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

Christ himself came down and took possession of me. . . I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God. . . in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my sense nor my imagination had any part: I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love.

The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship.