Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority. - Henri-Frédéric Amiel

To repel one's cross is to make it heavier.

Redemption, eternal life, divinity, humanity, propitiation, incarnation, judgment, Satan, heaven and hell — all these beliefs have been so materialized and coarsened, that with a strange irony they present to us the spectacle of things having a profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted. Christian boldness and Christian liberty must be reconquered; it is the church which is heretical, the church whose sight is troubled and her heart timid. Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric doctrine, there is a relative revelation; each man enters into God so much as God enters into him, or as Angelus, I think, said, "the eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me."

Without passion, man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.