Renunciation is submission to time.

We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.

One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us, and it is either directed somewhere into this world, or into another.

Fire destroys that which feeds it.

The virtue of hope is an orientation of the soul towards a transformation after which it will be wholly and exclusively love.

Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.

The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors.