The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?

science has now been for a long time - and to an ever-increasing extent - a collective enterprise. Actually, new results are always, in fact, the work of specific individuals; but, save perhaps for rare exceptions, the value of any result depends on such a complex set of interrelations with past discoveries and possible future researches that even the mind of the inventor cannot embrace the whole.

Christ himself came down and took possession of me. . . I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God. . . in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my sense nor my imagination had any part: I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love.

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.

The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.