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

Religion, born of the earth’s need for the disclosing of a god, is related to and co-extensive with not the individual man, but the whole of mankind.

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.

Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since.

The problem of evil, that is to say the reconciling of our failures, even the purely physical ones, with creative goodness and creative power, will always remain one of the most disturbing mysteries of the universe for both our hearts and our minds.

If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions.

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

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

The earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediately made use of and recast into something naturally directed.

How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music.

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‘Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.’

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

If I could live my life all over I’d do everything the same; the film in my camera would remain the same; there’s no way lord, to leave this love behind.

There is a cliche that men want their women to be ladies in public and hookers behind closed doors.

My views about God come from my dad. Dad told me that he believed Nature, which to him included humankind, to be so beautiful, so magnificent, that there had to be something behind it all.

I think there’s a little me hiding behind your leg, Chichi.” “I’m Goten.” “I’m Goku. Hi!” …. “Daddy!

Behind each door we shake is a reality.

Rosa Parks was primed, she had the Civil Rights Movement behind her, she didn’t just decide to sit on the bus, it was strategic.

Harriet Tubman didn’t have strategy meetings or a movement behind her, she was the movement.

When I get old and slow down I want to look behind me and see all the fire and the wreckage and no stone left unturned.