Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms.
The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.
The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it.
There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.
Every atheist is an idolater- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.
The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who coordinate.
It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.
For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation.
The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.
Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.
Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.
War, which perpetuates itself under the form of preparation for war, has once and for all given the State an important role in production.
Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the "I" from the outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves.
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.
To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.
The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.
The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.
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.
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.
When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.
All the Freudian system is impregnated with the prejudice which it makes it its mission to fight -- the prejudice that everything sexual is vile.
The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship.
If a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.
Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.
The great error of nearly all studies of war... has been to consider war as an episode in foreign policies, when it is an act of interior politics.
Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.
The essential characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value.
Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
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.
At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.
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 die for God is not a proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is a proof of faith in God.
The Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer not already contained in it. It is to prayer what Christ is to humanity.
It is not the cause for which men took up arms that makes a victory more just or less, it is the order that is established when arms have been laid down.
...nothing on earth can stop man from feeling himself born for liberty. Never, whatever may happen, can he accept servitude; for he is a thinking creature.
To wish to escape from solitude is cowardice. Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).
Everything without exception which is of value in me comes from somewhere other than myself, not as a gift but as a loan which must be ceaselessly renewed.
The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope.
There are only two sorts of greatness: true greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old, old lie of world conquest. Conquest is an ersatz greatness.
Today it is not nearly enough to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent.
The Great Beast is the only object of idolatry , the only ersatz of God , the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself.
Friendship is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, without coming any nearer, the very being who is as necessary to him as food.
Contemplating an object fixedly with the mind, asking myself, 'What is it?' without thinking of any other object or relating it to anything else for hours on end.
One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love - to serve the loved one without his knowing it - is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.
It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
What is surprising is not that oppression should make its appearance only after higher forms of economy have been reached, but that it should always accompany them.
If we forgive God for his crime against us, which is to have made us finite creatures, He will forgive our crime against him, which is that we are finite creatures.
Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.