“My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.”

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.

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.

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.

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

There is neither spirit nor matter in the world. The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter.

Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.

The soft climate and luxuriance of the tropics; the greenness, the fragrance, the flowers – extraordinary flowers covering the tallest trees and turning them into huge bouquets.

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.

Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.

One of the very few things that I do every single day is put on fragrance. If I’m not wearing make-up, if my hair’s not done, if I’m walking around in pyjamas – I still put my fragrance on. I will brush my teeth and put on my perfume.

Man can change his destiny-not by wishing for it, but by working for it.

I know a dramatic role is going to happen, but you just got to be patient, you know? It’s going to happen when it’s supposed to happen. I’m not rushing it. I’m not trying to make it happen tomorrow.

I don’t believe there is a God. If I were to believe in a god, l would believe in gods.

I am who I am today because of my mother.

The essence of science is independent thinking, hard work, and not equipment.

Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.