It is not genius, nor glory, nor love that reflects the greatness of the human soul; it is kindness.
Only three things are necessary to make life happy: the blessing of God, books , and a friend.
In relations between the rich and the strong, between the rich and the poor, between the master and the servant, it's liberty that grinds down, and the law which liberates.
Love is the beginning, the middle, and the end of everything.
A really sublime moment is that when the last ray of light breaks in upon the soul, and marshals into a single group all the scattered disconnected truths there. There is such a vast difference between the moment which follows, and the moment which precedes this one, between what we were before, and what we are after, that the word grace has been invented to convey the idea of this magic stroke, of this light from on high.
After speech, silence is the greatest power in the world.
Nothing is achieved without solitude.
The mind sees, the will commands, the man acts. What is it then to act? To act is to produce something. If you have produced nothing--if no result has been the fruit of your will, you have done nothing.
The inner life is the whole man, and forms all the worth of man.
Duty is the grandest of ideas, because it implies the idea of God, of the soul, of liberty, of responsibility, of immortality.
Neither genius, fame, nor love show the greatness of the soul. Only kindness can do that.
The universe shows us the life of God, or rather it is in itself the life of God. We behold in it his permanent action, the scene upon which his power is exercised, and in which all his attributes are reflected. God is not out of the universe any more than the universe is out of God. God is the principle, the universe is the consequence, but a necessary consequence, without which the principle would be inert, unfruitful, impossible to conceive.
It is not a slight thing, gentlemen, to force a man to say what he is, or what he believes himself to be; for that supreme word of man, that single expression which he utters of and upon himself is decisive. It lays down the basis upon which all judgment of him is to be formed. From that moment all the acts of his life must correspond to the answer given by him.
The Church had the words reason and liberty on her lips when the inalienable rights of the human race were threatened with shipwreck.
Real excellence and humility are not incompatible one with the other, on the contrary they are twin sisters.
Man forms himself in his own interior, and nowhere else.
There is nothing fruitful except sacrifice.
You saw me vacillating between error and truth, loving them equally because unable to distinguish the one from the other; the hour marked out by God for my enlightenment has come: He has shown me the powerlessness of reason, and the necessity of faith.
For Christians, the first of books is the Gospel and the Rosary is actually the abridgement of the Gospel.
Nothing wounds a friend like a want of confidence.
Happily, and thanks to God, there are orifices through which our inner life constantly escapes, and the soul, like the blood, hath its pores. The mouth is the chief and foremost of these channels which lead the soul out of its invisible sanctuary; it is by speech that man communicates the secret converse which is his real life.
Youth is life's beautiful moment.
The great men of antiquity were poor.
Like every man who appears at an epoch which is historical and rendered famous by his works, Jesus Christ has a history, a history which the church and the world possess, and which, surrounded by countless memorials, has at least the same authenticity as any other history formed in the same countries, amidst the same peoples and in the same times. As, then, if I would study the lives of Brutus and Cassius, I should calmly open Plutarch, I open the Gospel to study Jesus Christ, and I do so with the same composure.
Turn your eyes whither you will, enter into whatever temple you please, you will find there on the very threshold Prophecy and Sacrament .... whoever despises these two things, infallibly bends towards earth, knowing nothing of God but his name, and holding with him no other relations than ingratitude and forgetfulness.
