If we feel that any habit or pursuit, harmless in itself, is keeping us from God and sinking us deeper in the things of earth; if we find that things which others can do with impunity are for us the occasion of falling, then abstinence is our only course. Abstinence alone can recover for us the real value of what should have been for our help but which has been an occasion of falling. ... It is necessary that we should steadily resolve to give up anything that comes between ourselves and God.

The greatest obstacle to progress is not man's inherited pugnacity, but his incorrigible tendency to parasitism.

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful or to discover something that is true.

Love remembered and consecrated by grief belongs, more clearly than the happy intercourse of friends, to the eternal world; it has proved itself stronger than death.

Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.

Man, as we know him, is a poor creature; he is halfway between an ape and a god and he is travelling in the right direction.