The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'
