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“Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.”

“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.”

“The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.”

“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.”

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

“We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.”

“Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.”

“True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.”

“Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.”

“Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.”

“He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.”

“I can, therefore I am.”

“In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.”

“The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”

“Humility is attentive patience.”

“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”

“A mind enclosed in language is in prison.”

“A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.”

“Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.”

“The most important part of education — to teach the meaning of to know”

“Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.”

“If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.”

“To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.”

“When I read the catechism of the Council of Trent, it seems as though I had nothing in common with the religion there set forth.”

“God's love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God's love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.”

“Action is the pointer which shows the balance. We must not touch the pointer but the weight.”

“Alexander is to a peasant proprietor what Don Juan is to a happily married husband.”

“Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death's face. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn introduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years. On each one of these days the soul suffers violence. Regularly, each morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way. Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own "war aims." It effaces the very notion of war's being brought to an end. Consequently, nobody does anything to bring this end about. In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon? The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence. Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity, and so look to the outsider as though they deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him.”

“An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it — neither higher nor lower.”