Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.
The notion of looking on at life has always been hateful to me. What am I if I am not a participant? In order to be, I must participate.
Charity never humiliated him who profited from it, nor ever bound him by the chains of gratitude, since it was not to him but to God that the gift was made.
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.
The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become - to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being.