“In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions.”

Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought if one does achieve them, or worth worrying about if they evade one or are slow in coming. All that is really worth while is action – faithful action, for the world, and in God.

Whether one welcomes or deplores it, nothing is more surely and exactly characteristic of modern times than the irresistible invasion of the human world by technology. Mechanism invading like a tide all the places of the earth and all forms of social activity.

Long before the awakening of thought on earth, manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which have no parallel today.

Let man live at a distance from God, and the universe remains neutral or hostile to him. But let man believe in God, and immediately all around him the elements, even the irksome, of the inevitable organize themselves into a friendly whole, ordered to the ultimate success of life.

Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.

For me, the real earth is that chosen part of the universe, still almost universally dispersed and in course of gradual segregation, but which is little by little taking on body and form in Christ.

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

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

We shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.

The only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.

The profoundly ‘atomic’ character of the universe is visible in everyday experience, in raindrops and grains of sand, in the hosts of the living, and the multitude of stars; even in the ashes of the dead.

Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge .

There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me – I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‘escape of energy,’ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

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.

Sometimes a poor performance is better for enjoyment, because you can look at those things that were wrong and analyze them.

I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed.

I used to watch the world as if it was a performance and I would realize that certain things that people did moved me, and certain things didn’t move me, and I tried to analyze.

The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.

Although we can get to know ourselves better by sitting down and analyzing our characteristics or by listening to others’ perspectives on us, I believe that tidying is the best way.

It’s an organic thing that I try not to analyze too much, because I worry that it will go away.

Nothing annoys me more than having the most trivial action analyzed and explained.

I don’t analyze songs because I think it will make me a better songwriter, I just do it out of sheer curiosity.