The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.

The one thing that matters is the effort.

Whoever loves above all the approach of love will never know the joy of attaining it.

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

What was my body to me? A kind of flunkey in my service. Let but my anger wax hot, my love grow exalted, my hatred collect in me, and that boasted solidarity between me and my body was gone.

Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

The injustice of defeat lies in the fact that its most innocent victims are made to look like heartless accomplices. It is impossible to see behind defeat, the sacrifices, the austere performance of duty, the self-discipline and the vigilance that are there, those things the god of battle does not take account of.

One can be a brother only in something. Where there is no tie that binds men, men are not united but merely lined up.

Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country, fought to save it, struggled to make it beautiful. Only then will the love of farm or country fill his heart.

Are wars... anything but the means whereby a nation's problems are set, where creation is stimulated, there you have adventure. But there is no adventure in heads-or-tails, in betting that the toss will come out of life or death. War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.