You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.

It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me.

Religion is a form of nourishment. It is difficult to appreciate the flavor and food-value of something one has never eaten.

War is the supreme form of prestige.

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

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.

A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.