“It was the forest’s fault. Those two handsome woodcutters. An evil place, the forest, everyone knew it, full of temptations and imps...”

“Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them.”

“Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. ... We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.”

“The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.”

“Every man carries two bags about him, one in front and one behind, and both are full of faults. The bag in front contains his neighbors' faults, the one behind his own. Hence it is that men do not see their own faults, but never fail to see those of others.”

“The problem of Palestine was that everyone wanted things simple: everyone was an extremist because everyone wanted things simple. It was the problem of humanity. Good and evil, as if there were only those two. The interesting thing was to seek truth and then face it.”