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

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.

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.

What I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore.

I would like to express the thoughts of a man who, having finally penetrated the partitions and ceilings of little countries, little coteries, little sects, rises above all these categories and finds himself a child and citizen of the Earth.

God looks after children, animals and idiots.

I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.

I look for what needs to be done. After all, that’s how the universe designs itself.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on.

I had a chance to win $2 million, a week after high school graduation, and if I turned pro, the sponsor was going to financially support me.

Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.

I left Mainz after 18 years and thought, ‘Next time, I will work with a little less of my heart.’ I said that because we all cried for a week.

Man has climbed up from some lower animal form, but he has, as it were, pulled the ladder up after him.