All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.

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.

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.

One might lay down as a postulate: All conceptions of God which are incompatible with a movement of pure charity are false. All other conceptions of him, in varying degree, are true.

Fire destroys that which feeds it.

Uprooting is by far the most dangerous of the ills of human society, for it perpetuates itself.

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.