“There are gestures which, natural enough to begin with, later become artificial after they have been repeatedly praised. And then there are other gestures which, though we have acquired them after hard work and even against our very nature, end by becoming completely natural and seemingly native to us.”

For the truth is, my friend, that when a man tries to get ahead of others he is simply trying to save himself. When a man tries to drown out the names of other men he is merely trying to insure that his own be preserved in the memory of living men, because he knows that posterity is a close-meshed sieve which allows few names to get through to other ages.

It is not an instinct toward self-preservation which impels us to action, but rather an instinct toward expansion, toward invasion and encroachment. We don’t strive to maintain ourselves only, but to be more than we are already, to be everything.

Reason, which we have acquired in the struggle for life and which is a conservative force, tolerates only what serves to conserve or affirm this life. We don’t understand anything but what we must understand in order to live. But who can say that the inextinguishable longing to survive, the thirst for immortality, is not the proof, the revelation of another world, a world which envelops, and also makes possible, our world? And who can say that when reason and its chains have been broken, such dreams and delirium, such frenzied outbursts as Dr. Montarco’s, are not desperate leaps by the spirit to reach this other world?”

“Thinking idly is thinking as a substitute for doing, or thinking too much about what is already done instead of about what must be done. What’s done is done and over with, and one must go on to something else, for there is nothing worse than remorse without possible relief.”

I am put here to give life to the souls of my charges, to make them happy, to make them dream they are immortal—and not to destroy them. The important thing is that they live sanely, in concord with each other,—and with the truth, with my truth, they could not live at all. Let them live. That is what the Church does, it lets them live. As for true religion, all religions are true as long as they give spiritual life to the people who profess them, as long as they console them for having been born only to die.

For there are, Angela, two types of dangerous and harmful men: those who, convinced of life beyond the grave, of the resurrection of the flesh, torment other people—like the inquisitors they are—so that they will despise this life as a transitory thing and work for the other life; and then, there are those who, believing only in this life. . .” “Like you, perhaps. . .” “Yes, and like Don Manuel. Believing only in this world, this second group looks forward to some vague future society and exerts every effort to prevent the populace finding consoling joy from belief in another world. . .” “And so. . .” “The people should be allowed to live with their illusion.”