With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.

My standpoint is armed neutrality.

The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.

If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.

In a mathematical proposition, for example, the objectivity is given, but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth.

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

I have never fought in such a way as to say: I am the true Christian, others are not Christians.