Nothing is more vain than to seek to unite men by a philosophic minimum.

Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.

To be free is of the essence of every intellectual being.

Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves.

It is enough that things exist for God to be unavoidable. Let us but grant to a bit of moss or the smallest ant its due nature as an ontological reality, and we can no longer escape the terrifying hand that made us.

What we need is not truths that serve us but a truth we may serve.

The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge.

Whereas the intelligence of God is both the cause and the measure of the truth of things, things are both the cause and the measure of the truth of our intelligence.

We have just seen that perfection and contemplation imply each other by reason of love which is at once the essence of perfecton and “the source, the execize and the end” of contemplation. One can also show this mutual implication by the stressing the fact that under the regime of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is the state proper to perfection and to contemplation all at once. Saint Thomas teaches that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are necessary for salvation, because we are too weak all by ourselves always to use as we should even the theological virtues and the infused moral virtues. For, as saint Bonavenure tell us, “the gifts immediately dispose one to contemplation”.

A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.