“We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power..”

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.

Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.

Nothing can resist the person who smiles at life.

This note, which is essential to every form of mysticism, has even penetrated them so deeply that we find ourselves falling under a spell simply by uttering the names of their Gods.

At the extreme temperature occurring in the stars, matter can only survive in its most dissociated states. Only simple bodies exist on these incandescent stars.

For me, the Immaculate Conception is the feast of ‘passive action,’ the action that functions simply by the transmission through us of divine energy.

My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.

There they concentrate, little by little, all that is purest and most attractive in them without loss and without danger of subsequent corruption.

To say that Christ is the term and motive force of evolution, to say that he manifests himself as ‘evolver,’ is implicitly to recognize that he becomes attainable in and through the whole process of evolution.

By the sole fact of his entering into ‘Thought,’ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other’s encroachments.

I don’t mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him.

It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway.

We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.

Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.

We didn’t see [the NBA lockout] as a victory at all.

Be nice to everyone and all that.

Normally, you have all this knowledge from all the films that you’ve done that you’ve accumulated over the years

All of it has an effect.

I love Obama. He’s my favorite president of all time. I have a giant picture in my apartment in New York that is of his Chicago Tribune cover, Mr. President.

A certain traveler who knew many continents was asked what he found most remarkable of all.

You aren’t really writing about what you did; you’re writing about how you feel.

Kids play make-believe all the time