Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.

It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.

I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.

The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either

Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.

The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment ... is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time he is the only man who has not deserved the punishment. But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.