To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

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.

Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.

Love consents to all and commands only those who consent. Love is abdication. God is abdication.

If there were no affliction in this world we might think we were in paradise.

Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.

When we hit a nail with a hammer, the whole of the shock received by the large head of the nail passes into the point without any of it being lost, although it is only a point. If the hammer and the head of the nail were infinitely big it would be just the same. The point of the nail would transmit this infinite shock at the point to which it was applied. Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of soul and social degradation, all at the same time, constitutes the nail. The point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity, spreading throughout space and time.