“Neither the Christian attitude of love for all mankind nor humane hopes for an organized society must cause us to forget that the ‘human stratum’ may not be homogeneous.”

Religion, born of the earth’s need for the disclosing of a god, is related to and co-extensive with not the individual man, but the whole of mankind.

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.

Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since.

The problem of evil, that is to say the reconciling of our failures, even the purely physical ones, with creative goodness and creative power, will always remain one of the most disturbing mysteries of the universe for both our hearts and our minds.

If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions.

The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one’s self to others.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

The earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediately made use of and recast into something naturally directed.

How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music.

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‘Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.’

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

It was all so far away – there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.

Cats on the bandstand, give them each a big hand, anyone who sweats like that must be all right.

I place trust in God, my creator, in all things; I love Him with all my heart.

The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds.

Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.

I tell everybody, I get so much because I give so much. I give freely, I give all my time, give all my money, give all of my soul.

Before all else, be armed.

I repeat… that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that from the people and for the people all springs, and all must exist.