"The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry."

"It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance."

"To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself."

"A mind enclosed in language is in prison."

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

"Every perfect life is a parable invented by God."

"I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances."

"Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand."

"A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines."

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

"Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat."

"If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else."

"When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door."

"To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile."

"Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention."

"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."

"It is not the cause for which men took up arms that makes a victory more just or less, it is the order that is established when arms have been laid down."

"To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves."

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

"Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty."

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

"A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war."

"We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him."

"The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest."

"With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed."

"Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison."