... a secret and ardent stirring within the frozen chastity of the universal.

Thoughts come c.early while one walks.

Like any lover, he desired to please; suffered agonies at the thought of failure.

And then he'd rub his cheeks with cold cream because he'd just shaved and the tears stung.

Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?

He was simply not a “hero”, which is to say, he did not let his relationship with the man be determined by the woman.

Solitude favors the original, the daringly and otherworldly beautiful, the poem. But it also favors the wrongful, the extreme, the absurd, and the forbidden.

The perishableness of life...imparts value, dignity, interest to life.

But he discovered that his thoughts and inspirations were like the intimations of a dream, which always seem inspired at the time but prove utterly shallow and useless to the waking mind.

The average man thinks that a little falseness goes with beauty.

It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available.

Strangely fruitful intercourse this, between one body and another mind

...nearly everything great owes its existence to “despites”: despite misery and affliction, poverty, desolation, physical debility, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstacles.

.. that language could but extol, not reproduce, the beauties of the sense.

Thomas Buddenbrook's existence was no different from that of an actor - an actor whose lfe has become one long production, which but for a few hours for relaxation, consumes him unceasingly.

His steps were dictated by the demon who delights in destroying manfs reason and dignity.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our own image.

If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.

Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.

Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.

But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.

Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.

Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.

A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.

Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.

Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity.

Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds

The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.

Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.

What we have to be is what we are.

Pride makes us artificial; humility makes us real

When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.

Ask me not where I live or what I like to eat . . . Ask me what I am living for and what I think is keeping me from living fully that.

The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear.

I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to... fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost

The least of learning is done in the classrooms.

The deepest of level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless ... beyond speech ... beyond concept.

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.

Be still: There is no longer any need of comment. It was a lucky wind That blew away his halo with his cares, A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.

For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.

Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.