“Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding.”

It is in the measure that special methods acknowledge their common core in transcendental method, that norms common to all the sciences will be acknowledged, that a secure basis will be attained for tackling interdisciplinary problems.

No matter what your logic is, if it is coherent, you can develop a technique to express it.

Freely the subject makes himself what he is, never in this life is the making finished, always it is in process, always it is a precarious achievement that can slip and fall and shatter.

In philosophy an individual is becoming himself.

It dismantles and abolishes the horizon within which our knowing and choosing went on, and it sets up a new horizon within which the love of God transvalues our values and the eyes of that love transform our knowing.

Genius is creative. It is genius precisely because it disregards established routines, because it originates the novelties that will be the routines of the future. Were there rules for discovery, then discoveries would be mere conclusions.

There too his responsibility is greatest. There there occurs the emergence of his existential subject, finding out for himself that he has to decide for himself what he is to make of himself.

Choice is a determinant in personal development … by my free acts I am making myself.

And that the sciences will be mobilized within a higher unity of vocabulary, thought and orientation, in which they will be able to make their quite significant contribution to the solution of fundamental problems.

If the rejection is universal, then it is the self-destructive proposition that there are no true propositions. If the rejection is limited to the dogmas, then it is just a roundabout way of saying that all the dogmas are false.

Discovery is new beginning. It is the origin of new rules that supplement, or even supplant, the old.

Like all being in love, as distinct from particular acts of loving, it is a first principle. So far from resulting from our knowledge and choice.

For it is in the field where meaning is constitutive that man’s freedom reaches its highest point.

God is utterly simple; for every composite being necessarily has a cause of its own composition, and so, since God is the first principle of all things, there can be no real composition whatever in God.

Total surrender to the demands of the human spirit: be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, be in love.

The fulfilment that is being in love with God is not the product of our knowledge and choice. It is God’s gift.

However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind.

I am an avid believer that education – and especially early childhood development – is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty.

Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace.

I will tell you what man is. He is a freak, an ejected foetus robbed of his natural development, thrown out into the world with a naked covering of parchment, with too little room for his teeth and a soft bulging skull like a bubble. But nature stirs a pudding there.

The development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person’s development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

I think not just Nigeria but I think the whole of Africa has to turn back to the rural areas and that’s where the majority of the citizens are and that’s where the engine of of development has to be found.