Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.

The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.

In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.

The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people [during World War II] who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.

One might lay down as a postulate: All conceptions of God which are incompatible with a movement of pure charity are false. All other conceptions of him, in varying degree, are true.