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

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society.

I greatly enjoyed the Hawaiian Islands. They are a real little paradise in spite of the influx of Americans who have made it one of their most pleasant ‘centers of resort’.

The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.

At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first ‘feeling’ for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.

Certain though I am – and ever more certain – that I must press on in life as though Christ awaited me at the term of the universe, at the same time I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ. Believing is not seeing. As much as anyone, I imagine, I walk in the shadows of faith.

Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.

We have but one permanent home: heaven – that’s still the old truth that we always have to re-learn – and it’s only through the impact of sad experiences that we assimilate it.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers – a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity.

Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity.

Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

We are special because we’ve been united not by a common race or ethnicity. We’re bound together by common values. That family is the most important institution in society. That almighty God is the source of all we have.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

I’ve always been a night owl.

I’ve been anxious but not depressed. I’m an incorrigible optimist.

I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.

It is but another of the proofs which are heaping up in American industry to-day that whatever is good for men and women – contributes to their health, happiness, development – is good for business.

I had a lot of friends in high school, but I was never the wild party girl. Never have been, never plan to be!