To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities.

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.

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.

Education-whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people-consists in creating motives.

An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.