What makes us heroic? Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.

Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

It is through this lens of history that we should view the conflicts of today, and so give us hope for tomorrow.

Now a spark of hope flashes up, then a sea of despair rages, and always pain; always pain, always despair, and always the same.

Difficulties break some men but make others. No axe is sharp enough to cut the soul of a sinner who keeps on trying, one armed with the hope that he will rise even in the end.