In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock! |
In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs. |
In this world, only those people who have fallen to the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, who are not just without any social consideration but are regarded by all as being deprived of that foremost human dignity, reason itself / only those people, in fact, are capable of telling the truth. All the others lie. |
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. |
It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures. |
It would seem that man was born a slave, and that slavery is his natural condition. At the same time nothing on earth can stop man from feeling himself born for liberty. Never, whatever may happen, can he accept servitude; for he is a thinking creature. |
Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose. |
Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure. |
Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we don't happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data and yet we don't understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence. |
Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep; thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself. Man must learn to think of himself as a limited and dependent being; and only suffering teaches |
More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic. |
Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication. |
Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison. |
Nothing is less instructive than a machine. |
Obvious and inexorable oppression that cannot be overcome does not give rise to revolt but to submission. |