Only the present counts.

Hell is not to love anymore.

First of all, be what you are.

Hope is a risk that must be run.

What does it matter, all is grace.

Hell, madam, is to love no longer.

Hell, madame, is to love no longer.

The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.

[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.

A man given to vice is always an idealist.

There is nothing that God hates so much as a liar.

No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.

Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterward.

Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.

God knows that we should not despise anything. We must do our best.

The most dangerous of our calculations are those we call illusions.

The devil, you see, is that friend who never stays with us to the end.

To be able to share in another's joy, that is the secret of happiness.

A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.

The wish to pray is a prayer in itself. God can ask no more than that of us.

Faith is not a thing which one loses, we merely cease to shape our lives by it.

...the most dangerous shortsightedness consists in underestimating the mediocre.

It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so.

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it.

You owe it to everyone you love to find pockets of tranquility in your busy world.

It is the perpetual dread of fear, the fear of fear, that shapes the face of a brave man.

The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more.

Who are you to condemn another's sin? He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it.

Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.

Le de s ir de la prie' re est de j a' une prie' re. The wish for prayer is already a prayer.

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.

Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice?

Appearances are nothing.... And first of all they should not be feared, they are only dangerous to the weak.

God! how is it that we fail to recognize that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is that of anguish?

Money-crimes have an abstract quality. History is laden with the victims of gold, but their remains are odourless.

Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.

Our rages, daughters of despair, creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright.

Optimism approves of everything, submits to everything, believes everything; it is the virtue above all of the taxpayer.

I have just discovered something I have always known: we can no more escape from one another than we can escape from God.

God ordains that beggars should beg for greatness, as for all else, when greatness shines out of them, and they don't know it.

A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all.

All her life she [Chantal] had been carefully, heroically watching over mediocre beings who were hardly real, over things of no value.

I can now see to the bottom of my own depths, there is nothing stopping my gaze, no obstacle is in the way. And there is nothing there.

Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.

Suicide only really frightens those who are never tempted by it and never will be, for its darkness only welcomes those who are predestined to it.

I don't think we can ever learn much from ultra-sensitive, shifty faces, skilled in disguise, that hide themselves in lust, as beasts hide to die.

[A] good Christian does not care for miracles very much, because a miracle is God looking after His own affairs, and we prefer looking after them for Him.

What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness! Young birds on their first flight are hardly so hovered around.

Fear, true fear, is a savage frenzy. Of all the insanities of which we are capable, it is surely the cruelest. There is naught to equal its drive, and naught can survive its thrust.

I have done no passably decent job in this world which did not at first seem to me useless - absurdly useless, useless to the point of nausea. My secret demon is called:;: What's the use?

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