“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.”

Being happy is a matter of personal taste.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

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.

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.