Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right through to the soul. . . . When the feeling for beauty happens to be associated with the sight of some human being, the transference of love is made possible, at any rate in an illusory manner. But it is all the beauty of the world, it is universal beauty, for which we yearn.

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

Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the "I" from the outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves.

If someone does me injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil.

The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.

Today it is not nearly enough to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent.