To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.

How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.

Expectant waiting is the foundation of the spiritual life.

Christians ought to suspect that affliction is the very essence of creation. To be a created thing is not necessarily to be afflicted, but it is necessarily to be exposed to affliction. ... Affliction is the surest sign that God wishes to be loved by us; it is the most precious evidence of His tenderness.

Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.