In "Dialogues with Paul VI" (1967) the French philosopher Jean Guitton, a friend of the Pope, reports a testimony from Paul VI on everything he received from his parents: from his father he learned the courage of testimony, from his mother the concentration and prayer.«To my father I owe the examples of courage, the urgency of not supinely surrendering to evil, the oath to never prefer life to the reasons of life. His teaching can be summed up in one word: be a witness. My father was not afraid. And those who knew him, like Bonomelli, have retained something of their intrepidity.I owe my mother the sense of meditation, of interior life, of meditation which is prayer, of prayer which is meditation.To the love of my father and my mother, to their union (because father and mother must never be separated), I owe the love of God and the love of men. Or rather the love of God, which filled their hearts and had united them in their youth, translated into political action in my father and in silence in my mother. Or again, the same stubborn will, the same total determination, in my father expressed itself more as strength and in my mother more as sweetness. But sweetness rests on strength."(J. Guitton, Dialogues with Paul VI , Milan, 1967, p. 78).