1. "A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines."
2. "A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves."
3. “A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again and look with terror at the wall, until one day he begins afresh to beat his head against it; and once again he will faint. And so on endlessly and without hope. One day he will wake up on the other side of the wall.”
4. "A mind enclosed in language is in prison."
5. "Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction."
6. "A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war."
7. "A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams."
8. "Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached."
9. "At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done"
10. "Beauty always promises, but never gives anything."
11. "Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers."
12. "Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings."
13. "Every man who has once touched the level of the impersonal is charged with a responsibility towards all human beings: to safeguard, not their persons, but whatever frail potentialities are hidden within them for passing over to the impersonal."
14. "Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge."
15. “Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.”
16. "Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it."
17. "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."
18. "I can, therefore I am."
19. "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."
20.”If we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire.”
21. ”Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life.”
22. "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."
23. "In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention."
24. "In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish."
25. "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."
26. "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."
27. "It is therefore wrong to reproach the mystics, as has been done sometimes, because they use love's language. It is theirs by right. Others only borrow it."
28. "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."
29. “Just as a person who is always asserting that he is too good-natured is the very one from whom to expect, on some occasion, the coldest and most unconcerned cruelty, so when any group sees itself as the bearer of civilization this very belief will betray it into behaving barbarously at the first opportunity.”
30. “Learn to reject friendship, or rather the dream of friendship. To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art, or life (like aesthetic joys). I must refuse it in order to be worthy to receive it.”
31. "Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure."
32. "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."
33. "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"
34. "Most idealistic people are skint. I have discovered that people with money have no imagination, and people with imagination have no money.
35. "Nothing is less instructive than a machine."
36. "Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission."
37. “Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement.”
38. "Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought."
39. "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"
40. "The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough."
41. "The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work."
42. "The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes."
43. "The future is made of the same stuff as the present."
44. “The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”
45. "The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know."
46. "The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation."
47. "The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever."
48. "The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities."
49. "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."
50. "There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too."
51. “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”
52. "The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil."
53. "There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies."
54."The universe is an abandonment."
55. "Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention."
56."To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul."
57. "To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile."
58.“To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.”
59."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."
60. "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."
61. "Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link."
62."We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them, but by waiting for them."
63."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."
64. "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 more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict."
65."Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being."
66. "When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door."
67."When a man's life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men's actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration toward the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him."
68. "When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder."
69. "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."
70."Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?"
