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To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.
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I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me, leading me, grasping me; because I possess an inner consciousness of a particular providence and of a universal mind that marks out for me the course of my own destiny.
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I would say that teleology is theology, and that God is not a "because," but rather an "in order to.
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We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best.
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There is no tyranny in the world more hateful than that of ideas. Ideas bring ideophobia, and the consequence is that people begin to persecute their neighbors in the name of ideas. I loathe and detest all labels, and the only label that I could now tolerate would be that of ideoclast or idea breaker.
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The will, the will not ever to die, the refusal to resign oneself to death, ceaselessly builds the house of life while the keen blasts and icy winds of reason unceasingly batter at the structure and beat it down.
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It is truer to say that martyrs create faith more than faith creates martyrs.
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These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.
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Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.
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Cure yourself of the inclination to bother about how you look to other people. Be concerned only . . . with the idea God has of you.
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Every peasant has a lawyer inside of him, just as every lawyer, no matter how urbane he may be, carries a peasant within himself.
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If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man.
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Isolation is the worst possible counselor.
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My work...is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself.
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The truth is that my work - I was going to say my mission - is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.
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Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.
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Science says: 'We must live,' and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable, wisdom says: 'We must die,' and seeks how to make us die well.
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My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread; I'm selling yeast.
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It is not the shilling I give you that counts, but the warmth that it carries with it from my hand.
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A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about.
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Science is the most intimate school of resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly most insignificant of facts.
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May God deny you peace but give you glory!
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Science robs men of wisdom and usually converts them into phantom beings loaded up with facts.
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Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself - that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks - he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech - this thing that they call a social product - was made for lying.