“The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‘renouncing’ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ in the usual meaning of the words.”

Surely the wake left behind by mankind’s forward march reveals its movement just as clearly as the spray thrown up elsewhere by the prow.

If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.

Truly, there is a Christian note which makes the whole World vibrate, like an immense gong, in the divine Christ. This note is unique and universal, and in it alone consists the Gospel.

For ninety per cent of those who view him from outside, the Christian God looks like a great landowner administering his estates, the world. Now this conventional picture, which is too well justified by appearances, corresponds in no way to the dogmatic basis or point of view of the Gospels.

In the divine milieu, all the elements of the universe touch each other by that which is most inward and ultimate in them.

By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross.

Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and ‘superlive,’ as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.

Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.

So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort.

Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.

There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life’s point of no return.

Return to the battle again, no longer trusting in the false and insufficient human resources which so foolishly.

It is no longer an allegation, it is an established fact, even if no evidence has been brought out in order to support it.

If I have anything to do with it. I have not heard it since it was finished. I hope the tapes no longer exist.

If a can opener no longer has the capacity to open cans, what is it?

A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.

You do live longer with bran, but you spend the last fifteen years on the toilet.

The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.