Gravity and Grace↗

All the natural movements of the soul are governed by laws analogous to those of material gravity. Grace alone is the exception. One must always expect things to happen in accordance with gravity,...

Human mechanics. Whoever suffers tries to communicate his suffering—either by ill-treating others or by arousing their pity—in order to reduce it, and he does really reduce it in this way. The one...

"We hold as a tradition concerning the gods, and we see by experience concerning men, that always, by a necessity of nature, every being exercises all the power at its disposal" (Thucydides). Like a...

To attain total detachment, misfortune is not enough. One needs a misfortune without consolation. One must have no consolation. No representable consolation. Then ineffable consolation descends. To...

The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass. Every void (that is not accepted) produces hatred, bitterness, sourness, rancor. The evil one wishes...

Time is an image of eternity, but it is also a substitute for eternity. The miser from whom his treasure has been taken. It is frozen past that is taken from him. Past and future, the only riches of...

Purification is the separation of good from covetousness. To descend to the source of desires in order to tear the energy away from its object. It is there that desires are true as energy. It is the...

We possess nothing in the world—for chance can take everything from us—except the power to say I. That is what must be given to God, that is to say, destroyed. There is absolutely no other free act...

Decreation: to make the created pass into the uncreated. Destruction: to make the created pass into nothingness. A guilty substitute for decreation. Creation is an act of love, and it is perpetual....

God gave me being so that I might give it back to him. It is like one of those tests that resemble traps, found in fairy tales and initiation stories. If I accept this gift, it is bad and fatal; its...

The sun shines on the just and on the unjust. God makes himself necessity. Two faces of necessity: exercised and undergone. Sun and cross. To accept being subject to necessity and to act only by...

One moves toward a thing because one believes it is good, and one remains chained to it because it has become necessary. Sensible things are real as sensible things, but unreal as goods. Appearance...

Idolatry comes from the fact that, while thirsting for absolute good, one does not possess supernatural attention and has not the patience to let it grow. Without idols, one must often, every day or...

Love is a sign of our wretchedness. God can love only himself. We can love only something other than ourselves. It is not because God loves us that we must love him. It is because God loves us that...

Creation: the good broken into pieces and scattered throughout evil. Evil is the limitless, but it is not infinite. Only the infinite limits the limitless. Monotony of evil: nothing new; everything...

Suffering: the superiority of man over God. The Incarnation was necessary so that this superiority would not be scandalous. I must not love my suffering because it is useful, but because it is. To...

Death is what has been given most precious to man. That is why the supreme impiety is to make bad use of it. To die badly. To kill badly. (But how can one escape both suicide and murder?) After...

Whoever takes up the sword shall perish by the sword. And whoever does not take up the sword (or lets it go) shall perish on the cross. Christ healing the infirm, raising the dead, etc. — that is the...

Cross as balance, as lever. Descent, condition of the ascent. Heaven descending to earth raises earth to heaven. Lever. To lower when one wishes to raise. It is in the same manner that "he who...

Human life is impossible. But only affliction makes one feel it. The impossible good: "Good brings about evil, evil brings about good, and when will it end?" The good is impossible. — But man always...

The contradictions the mind comes up against are the only realities, the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in the imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity. Contradiction...

Necessity is the veil of God. God has entrusted all phenomena without exception to the mechanism of the world. As there is in God the analogue of all human virtues, so also of obedience. This is the...

The beings I love are creatures. They were born by chance. My meeting with them was also chance. They will die. What they think, what they feel, and what they do is limited and mixed with good and...

God can be present in creation only in the form of absence. The evil and the innocence of God. One must place God at an infinite distance in order to conceive him as innocent of evil; reciprocally,...

A case of true contradictories. God exists; God does not exist. Where is the problem? I am quite certain that there is a God, in the sense that I am quite certain my love is not an illusion. I am...

Not to understand new things, but to arrive, by dint of patience, effort, and method, at understanding the evident truths with one's whole self. Levels of belief. The most commonplace truth, when it...

One must accomplish the possible in order to touch the impossible. The correct exercise, in conformity with duty, of the natural faculties of will, love, and knowledge is to spiritual realities...

We know by means of the intelligence that what the intelligence does not apprehend is more real than what it does apprehend. Faith is the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by love. But...

The other. To perceive each human being (image of oneself) as a prison in which a prisoner dwells, with the whole universe around. Electra, daughter of a powerful father, reduced to slavery, having...

Other civilizations. Their defects are given as proof of the insufficiency of the religions to which they are attached. Yet in Europe, in the course of the last twenty centuries of history, one could...

We are a part that must imitate the whole. The atman. Let the soul of a man take the entire universe as its body. Let it have with the entire universe the same relationship as that of a collector to...

All created things refuse to be ends for me. Such is the extreme mercy of God toward me. And that itself is evil. Evil is the form that the mercy of God takes in this world. This world is the closed...

Beauty is the harmony of chance and the good. The beautiful is the necessary which, while remaining obedient to its own law and to it alone, obeys the good. Object of science: the beautiful (that...

Money, machinery, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization. Complete analogy. Algebra and money are essentially levelers, the first intellectually, the second effectively. The life of...

Man is a slave insofar as between action and its effect, between effort and the finished work, there is placed the intervention of alien wills. This is the case both for the slave and for the master...

The great beast is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatz of God, the only imitation of an object that is infinitely distant from me and that is me. If one could be selfish, that would be quite...

Christendom became totalitarian, conquering, exterminatory because it did not develop the notion of the absence and non-action of God here below. It clung to Jehovah as much as to Christ; it...

With respect to any given order, a superior order, hence infinitely above it, can be represented in the first only by an infinitely small thing. The mustard seed, the instant as image of eternity,...

The secret of the human condition is that there is no equilibrium between man and the surrounding forces of nature that infinitely surpass him in inaction; there is equilibrium only in action, by...