Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.

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.

In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention.

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.

It is not the cause for which men took up arms that makes a victory more just or less, it is the order that is established when arms have been laid down.