We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in the apprenticeship to virtue.

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

To be always relevant, you have to say things which are eternal.

Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right through to the soul. . . . When the feeling for beauty happens to be associated with the sight of some human being, the transference of love is made possible, at any rate in an illusory manner. But it is all the beauty of the world, it is universal beauty, for which we yearn.

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

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.

We are like plants which have the one choice of being in or out of the light.