The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people [during World War II] who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.

Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.

If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there, too, we know it is false; as soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who when their turn comes will manufacture professors.

Education-whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people-consists in creating motives.

There are only two sorts of greatness: true greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old, old lie of world conquest. Conquest is an ersatz greatness.

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.