African Spir Quotes

As humanity began with flint tools, and has arrived little by little to the powerful and perfected machines of today, so man, by shaping himself generation after generation, will arrive to a degree of perfection which, up to now, the example was given to us only by rare individuals.

Only a moral education based on free inner discipline can bring to bear a salutary action and lead to a true morality.

If at a banquet someone were to rip the morsels from the mouths of the guests, we would be unanimous in finding their behaviour to be iniquitous and brutal, but when the same is done in a less conspicuous way, people are hardly offended.

Man is in pursuit of two goals: he is looking for happinesse and, being by essence empty, he is trying to fill his life; the latter reason plays a more considerable role than we ordinarily think. What we take for vainglory, ambition, love of power and riches, is often, indeed, a need to mask this emptiness.

Education has a tremendous power on man. Can't we see to which the astonishing discipline the people of Sparta have submitted for centuries? And this with a view to very petty purposes: purely outer greatness, the military predominace of Sparta. This example proves that men can do most anything they want; therefore it would only be a question of making them will the good.

The virtue preached by devout persons is the virtue of the slave who always believes themselves under the eye of the master. However, Jésus said: 'Serve God not as slaves, but as sons in the house'

If we possessed a more developed moral sense, we'd be as disgusted by the rapacity of those who seek to profit and take without regard for others, as we are by a foul smell.

To reform society, and with it humanity, there is only one means; to transform the mentality of men, to direct them in a new spirit.

Nothing depicts better the poverty of human nature than to see men, placed as the leaders of nations, be preoccupied only with their own prestige and their own personal interest.

Place a spider on top of a mountain and it will only try to catch flies; alas, they are many who, in the figurative meaning, have spider's eyes.

Men generally are too inclined to let themselves be overawed by what is quantitatively great. It is thus that even thoughtful minds let themselves be impressed by the strength of Napoleon, so much so that they see in his person something august or majestic, when in fact he only had selfish ambitions. Half the earth was put to fire and sword to obtain for a man the pleasant sensation of his own absolute power.

The realization of justice is, in the actual state of things, a matter of life or death for society and for civilisation itself.

The social organization of work is the most complicated and difficult problem that humanity has ever had to solve. It being possible to realize this organization neither by violence, nor by merely external or legal measures, it requires the free participation of all to the common work, and, consequently, to a regeneration of men that brings them to overcome their selfishness and to understand their duty towards themselves and towards the community.

If the abandonment of religious and moral principles was to become widespread, the consequences could be become such that we would finally see crop up in the very heart of civilisation, a new and apalling barbarism capable of engulfing all the acquisitions of the past.

It is not on the ruins of liberty that we may in the future build justice.