"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."

"Humility is attentive patience."

"Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication."

"If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else."

"I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances."

"Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought."

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

"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."

"All sins are attempts to fill voids."

"The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest."

"We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him."

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

"Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison."

"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."

"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."

"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 future is made of the same stuff as the present."

"The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit."

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

"Nothing is less instructive than a machine."

"The real stumbling-block of totalitarian regimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men's inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth."

"The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work."

"Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention."

"The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes."

"The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know."

"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."

"A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves."

"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."

"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."

"Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being."

"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."

"The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."

"Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does."

"The future is made of the same stuff as the present"

"We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits -- and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful."

"Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it."

"At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done"

"Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we don't happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data and yet we don't understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence."

"The role of the intelligence -that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit."

"The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell"

"The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, What are you going through?"

"Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers."

"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."

"An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God."

"When a man's life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men's actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration toward the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him."

"Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link."

"Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat."

"When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door."

"The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities."

"The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either"