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I consider that the spiritual life is the life of man’s real self, the life of that interior self whose flame is so often allowed to be smothered under the ashes of anxiety and futile concern.
although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling.
our love of ourselves is something we owe to others.
we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another.
The more I seek to take advantage of others the less of a person will I myself be, for the anxiety to possess what I should not have narrows and diminishes
we too easily assume that we are our real selves, and that our choices are really the ones we want to make when, in fact, our acts of free choice are (though morally imputable, no doubt) largely dictated by psychological compulsions, flowing from our inordinate ideas of our own importance.
Just as a good play depends on the scene, the lighting, and all the rest, so too our interior life owes much of its character to the setting and lighting and background and atmosphere which are provided, without any deliberate action of our own, by our subconscious mind.
The first duty of every man is to seek the enlightenment and discipline without which his conscience cannot solve the problems of life.
Perhaps if I only realized that I do not admire what everyone seems to admire, I would really begin to live after all.
If we strive to be happy by filling all the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life’s leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth.
It is by making mistakes that we gain experience, not only for ourselves but for others. And though our experience prevents neither ourselves nor others from making the same mistake many times, the repeated experience still has a positive value.
Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.
What, then, is truth? Truth, in things, is their reality. In our minds, it is the conformity of our knowledge with the things known. In our words, it is the conformity of our words to what we think. In our conduct, it is the conformity of our acts to what we are supposed to be.
Truthfulness, sincerity, and fidelity are close kindred. Sincerity is fidelity to the truth. Fidelity is an effective truthfulness in our promises and resolutions.
Half the civilized world makes a living by telling lies. Advertising, propaganda, and all the other forms of publicity that have taken the place of truth have taught men to take it for granted that they can tell other people whatever they like provided that it sounds plausible and evokes some kind of shallow emotional response.
Why do we get angry about what we believe? Because we do not really believe it. Or else what we pretend to be defending as the “truth” is really our own self-esteem. A man of sincerity is less interested in defending the truth than in stating it clearly, for he thinks that if the truth be clearly seen it can very well take care of itself.
the men of our time do not love with enough courage to risk even discomfort or inconvenience.
The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people.
A person is a person insofar as he has a secret and is a solitude of his own that cannot be communicated to anyone else.
Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else.
If our life is poured out in useless words we will never hear anything in the depths of our hearts,
