To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.

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.

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.

I can, therefore I am.

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.

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

A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.

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

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

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.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

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

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

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

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.

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

The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.

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

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