Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

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

The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.

We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.

We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in the apprenticeship to virtue.