The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.

Someone who does not see a pane of glass is not aware of not seeing it.

A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.

It is grace that forms the void inside us and it is grace that can fill the void.

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.

Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.