 The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know. |
| What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war. |
| It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures. |
| 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. |
| The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes. |
| As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles. |
| A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves. |
| Humility is attentive patience. |
| We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits - and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful. |
| If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else. |
| I can, therefore I am. |
| A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams. |
| Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat. |
| I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded. |
| The future is made of the same stuff as the present. |
| There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too. |
| In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock! |
| Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link. |
| The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell. |
| When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door. |
