“To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.”

No longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human.

It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.

Purity, in spite of outward appearances, is essentially an active virtue, because it concentrates God in us and on those who are subject to our influence.

Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.

Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

All ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances.

In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.

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.

That went for the writers, too; they all had their own political leanings, and everybody had a voice. But the voices were mostly critical. It was social commentary, after all.

To the media, I have become a symbolic figure, critical of China. According to the government, I am a dangerous threat.

Some media in the world are more critical towards what’s happening than others.

Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

Re-vision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

It’s sort of a mental attitude about critical thinking and curiosity.

America has a critical role to play as the most powerful member of the world community.

There are jokes I tell in the show that don’t get laughs unless I am in front of an audience of critical thinkers.