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The Mark of Eternity
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Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.
If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.
Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.
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Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus — the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.
Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. … Every separation is a link.
Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot…
