 The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest. |
| Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought. |
| Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge. |
| Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand. |
| Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission. |
| The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil. |
| The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work. |
| There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul. |
| To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile. |
| The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit. |
| There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice. |
| More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic. |
| If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe. |
| Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does. |
| Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings. |
| An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God. |
| With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed. |
| Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached. |
| A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war. |
| 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. |
