Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
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Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.
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Hélas, if only men could love not with one half of their hearts but with the whole organ that the Lord has given them, no one would deserve t...
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Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
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It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
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What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.
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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 him this.
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The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
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To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.
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Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.
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A mind enclosed in language is in prison.
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The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.
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Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors who when their turn comes, will manufacture professors.
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Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
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When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous.
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Bourgeois society is infected by monomania the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.
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One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.
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It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
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There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.
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All sins are attempts to fill voids.
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The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, What are you going through
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The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
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To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
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Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
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To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
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Most idealistic people are skint. I have discovered that people with money have no imagination, and people with imagination have no money.
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The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at.
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When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
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Woe to whomever laughs once and gets used to it because life's treacherousness knows no bounds and when she bestows gifts on you with one hand...
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Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.
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