Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

He who understands the wise is wise already.

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.

If something's a little weird, it's Kafkaesque.

To me, intolerance leads down a dreadful path that the world sometimes seems to be going to.

In the measure to which a man cuts off and humbles his own will, he proceeds toward success. But insofar as he stubbornly guards his own will, so much does he brings harm to himself.

According to all the experts, it's time for me to talk about what I'm going through... I can't. I'd need a new alphabet, one made of falling, of tectonic plates shifting, of the deep devouring dark.

Prayer as a relationship is probably your best indicator about the health of your love relationship with God. If your prayer life has been slack, your love relationship has grown cold.

The Koran and the laws of all civilized nations legislate against the vilification of religions.

At the age of five she has already come to terms with one of the life's harshest lessons: that the world isn't fair.

I'm constantly making exhibitions in my head.

We should not allow the fundamentalists and the bigots to take over and speak for the great faiths any more than we should let them take over and speak for the great nation.