A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral (or A pile of rocks ceases to be a pile a rocks when someone has a cathedral in mind).
Charity never humiliated him who profited from it, nor ever bound him by the chains of gratitude, since it was not to him but to God that the gift was made.
For true love is inexhaustible the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow.
Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, the necessity of being the man you are, and not another. You are free to be that man, but not free to be another.
I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin.
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
