Ultimately, we wish the joy of perfect union with the person we love.

A practical problem can only be solved by action itself. When your practical problem is how to earn a living, a book on how to make friends and influence people cannot solve it, though it may suggest things to do. Nothing short of the doing solves the problem. It is solved only by earning a living.

The philosopher ought never to try to avoid the duty of making up his mind.

The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.

Great speed in reading is a dubious achievement; it is of value only if what you have to read is not really worth reading. A better formula is this: Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.

I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith.

Angels are able to know and understand better than the human intellect can, precisely because such knowledge and understanding comes to them by way of ideas infused in them by God.

Idling is important. Most people don't know how. They're afraid of it. This explains why they turn on the television set or pick up the newspaper. They think they have to be doing something.

There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception.

The mind can atrophy, like the muscles, if it is not used.

We ought to desire whatever is really good for us and nothing else.

The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.

More consequences for thought and action follow the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question.

Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business.

One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.

Conjugal love, or the friendship of spouses, can persist even after sexual desires have weakened, withered, and disappeared.

Angels are not merely forms of extraterrestrial intelligence.

They are forms of extra-cosmic intelligence.

Work is toil: what one does only to earn a living. If it gives pleasure, it is leisure.

Books are absent teachers.

The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice.