Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.

Fire destroys that which feeds it.

At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.

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

Christians ought to suspect that affliction is the very essence of creation. To be a created thing is not necessarily to be afflicted, but it is necessarily to be exposed to affliction. ... Affliction is the surest sign that God wishes to be loved by us; it is the most precious evidence of His tenderness.

The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics when it is especially an act of internal politics and the most atrocious act of all . . . Since the directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death-the war of one state against another state resolves itself into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own people.

Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.