"It is the small flock of God. "Whoever receives in my name one of those little" said Jesus, "It is myself who receives." What thinks the one that sticks, that maims, or inflicts to their pure souls more black sorrow than death? (...) The curse of a crowd of children, is a cataclysm, a horror prodigy, a chain of dark mountains in the sky, with a cavalcade of thunder and lightning in their tops. It is the infinite of the cries of all deep, is a not know what highly powerful unforgiving and extinguishing any hope of forgiveness."

"Bloy ... believed that those who are wealthy and who keep their wealth for themselves even as the poor continue to suffer and perish, are in God's eyes the murderers of their brothers and sisters."

"The worst thing is not to commit crimes but, rather, not to accomplish the good that one could have done. It is the sin of omission, which is nothing other than to be unloving, and no one accuses himself of it."

"Suffering passes, but the fact of having suffered never passes."

"The rich have a horror of Poverty because they have a dim foreboding of the expiatory interchange implied by her presence."

"The exercise of freedom consists in stripping oneself of one's own will."

"You are always on the right side when you are with those who suffer persecution and injustice."

"I see from time to time coins that are tinted with red, having been handled by a butcher or a murderer, and the sight of that money makes me wonder. As I think about the probable origin of that sign of wealth, I tell myself that that is indeed its true color, the color which it should, which it must have, the color that was doubtless taken on by Judas’s pieces of silver, after which he ceased to recognize them and returned them at once to the egregious scoundrels who had given them to him. These, not recognizing the pieces themselves, did not want to return to the treasury of the Temple money so strange in its color. Everyone knows they used it to buy the field of blood, a generic name which I imagine can be applied to all bourgeois holdings ever since the Scourging and Crucifixion of Jesus Christ."

"Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig."

"The Bourgeois who has religious feelings sees very clearly the absolute necessity of serving two masters at the same time in order to achieve success in his business, which naturally comes before everything else."

"There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint."

"Ah! The happy ones of this world who are assured their daily bread—that is, all the things necessary to bodily life—and who, not wishing to know Jesus, have never for one single instant had the idea of suffering for their brothers, of sacrificing themselves for the wretched: ah! indeed! such people are assuredly well qualified to judge me and to reproach me for not having what the world calls dignity!"

"My anger is the effervescence of my pity."

"Of the truths which embarrass him he thinks it better to remain unaware."

"Unhappy writer, you had dreamt of winning souls and you have won nothing but ears!"

"Tu seras invendable à perpétuité, l'Invendable, dans tes livres aussi bien que dans ta personne, et ainsi se réalisera tout à fait la séparation, naturellement désirée par toi, d'avec les vendeurs et les gens à vendre."

"Woe to him who has not begged! There is nothing more exalted than to beg. God begs. The Angels beg. Kings, Prophets, and Saints beg."

"You had hoped that the beloved and noble images flowing from your heart would serve as a river to carry to God many another heart! But, as you see, people are afraid of getting wet."

"One sees the world's evil accurately only by exaggerating it."

"A perfectly true thought, expressed in very sound terms, can satisfy the reason without giving any impression of the Beautiful; but in that case certainly there is something false in its statement. It is essential that Truth be in Glory. Splendor of style is not a luxury. It is a necessity."

"Of course the avaricious man of our day, be he landlord, merchant, industrialist, does not adore sacks of coins or bundles of banknotes in some little chapel and upon some little altar. He does not kneel before these spoils of other men, nor does he address prayers or canticles to them amidst odorous clouds of incense. But he proclaims that money is the only good, and he yields it all his soul. A cult sincere, without hypocrisy, never growing weary, never forsworn. Whenever he says, in the debasement of his heart and his speech, that he loves money for the delights it can purchase, he lies or he terribly deceives himself, this very assertion being belied at the very moment he utters it by every one of his acts, by the infinite toil and pains to which he gladly condemns himself in order to acquire or conserve that money which is but the visible figure of the Blood of Christ circulating throughout all His members."

"I have a rather masculine nature. I'm not afraid of anything."

"I have got only one wrinkle, and I am sitting on it."

"I took pleasure when I could... I acted clearly and morally and without regret. I'm very lucky."

"I had a hell of a lot of will power! A hell of a will power, you understand? And it was very useful to me."

"Every age has its happiness and troubles."

"I wait for death... and journalists."

"I had to wait 110 years to become famous... I intend to enjoy it as long as possible."

"I see badly, I hear badly, and I feel bad, but everything's fine."

"Every given reality implies the thought which apprehends it. Therefore being is the condition of knowing; knowing is not the condition of being."

"The realist method starts with the whole in order to distinguish the parts."

"All realism derives from the analysis of knowledge; all idealism derives from the analysis of a thought."

"I maintain, therefore, that just as there is in Cartesianism a methodical idealism, the kind that starts with nosse [knowing], there can be a methodical realism, the kind that starts with esse [being]."

"The scientific sterility of the Middle Ages has to be condemned for the same reasons which make it necessary today to condemn the philosophic sterility of scientism."

"If there is something more in a living being than a pure mechanism, Descartes is bound in advance to miss it."

"Gilson criticizes attempts to trace Dante's position back to Thomism or Averroism. For St. Thomas, every hierarchy of dignity is at the same time a hierarchy of jurisdiction, while for Dante—except for God—a hierarchy of dignity is never the foundation of a hierarchy of jurisdiction, and this corresponds to Dante's specific philosophical problem, which is not so much to define the essence of philosophy as to determine functions and jurisdictions. The principle governing this determination is absolutely irreconcilable with Thomism. St. Thomas knows only one ultimate end: eternal bliss, which can only be attained through the Church; moreover, the spirituality of the ultimate end implies that between temporal and spiritual power there is a hierarchical subordination of the means to the end. For Dante, on the other hand, man can obtain, through the exercise of political virtues, a human happiness completely distinct from heavenly bliss, even if the latter represents a higher end. The thesis of the “duo ultima” legitimizes the complete distinction between the political order and the religious order, which is equally universal to that of the Church, but autonomous and pursuing an end of earthly happiness."

"Most of our contemporaries think that, at bottom, being a philosopher and adopting an idealist method are one and the same thing."

"Having left us with thought (not a soul), and extension (not a body), [Descartes] does not know how to account for the union of soul and body."

"Having expelled quality from the field of extension, [idealists] do not know how to account for it when it reappears in thought."

"Hume's skepticism, therefore, descends in a direct line from Cartesian mathematicism."

"Up to Descartes' time, and particularly during the Middle Ages, it had always been agreed that philosophy consisted in a transposition of reality into conceptual terms"

"Reality can be grasped at levels of different depths. It is immediately given to us in a kind of block form, which is simply the "apprehended reality"."

"It is not that Dante intends to combat the cupiditas of the clergy in order to save the autonomy of the State; rather, “it is the struggle against cupiditas, the need to thoroughly permeate public life with religion, that leads him to distinguish between the orders.” In other words, the central point of his thinking, which leads him to overcome both Guelphism and Ghibellinism, is "the intuition of the concordance between the affirmation of the autonomy of the Empire, hitherto supported by heterodox thinkers, and that of the purification of the Church affirmed by spiritual writers," which is in line with what the best interpreter of Dante's philosophy, Étienne Gilson, defines as the singular and unique feature of his thought, irreducible to any source."

"If there is a single initial error at the root of all the difficulties philosophy is involved in, it can only be the one Descartes committed when he decreed, a priori, that the method of one of the sciences of reality was valid for the whole of reality."

"While Descartes finds being in thought, Saint Thomas finds thought in being."

"What, then, will this philosophy be? Thomas only employed it for the service it renders Christian wisdom. No doubt this is why he never thought of separating it from this wisdom and giving it a name. He probably did not foresee that the day would come when people would go through his works to extract the elements of a philosophy from his theology. He himself never attempted this synthesis."

"The mathematician always proceeds from thought to being or things. Consequently, critical idealism was born the day Descartes decided that the mathematical method must henceforth be the method for metaphysics."

"Indeed, all idealism derives from Descartes, or from Kant, or from both together, and whatever other distinguishing features a system may have, it is idealist to the extent that, either in itself, or as far as we are concerned, it makes knowing the condition of being."

"Thomas considers that a religious may legitimately aspire to the title and functions of master, but since he could only teach divine things, it is only in relation to the science of divine things that secular sciences can legitimately interest him. This is demanded by the very essence of the contemplative life, the teaching of which is nothing but its immediate extension into the order of the active life."

"Philosophy always buries its undertakers."