Sin is nothing else but the failure to recognize human wretchedness.

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 villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty.

The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics when it is especially an act of internal politics and the most atrocious act of all . . . Since the directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death-the war of one state against another state resolves itself into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own people.

Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty.

No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope.

Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.