“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.”

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.

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.

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.

I have made the most important discovery of my career, the most important discovery of my life.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

There is no better high than discovery.

There is a great difference between discoveries and inventions. With discoveries, one can always be skeptical, and many surprises can take place. In the case of inventions, surprises can really only occur for people who have not had anything to do with it.

In completing one discovery we never fail to get an imperfect knowledge of others.

Some of the greatest things, as I understand, they have come about by serendipity, the greatest discoveries

With so many scientific achievements we know so little of where we came from and where we are going. But we know even less of the most important discovery of all.

There are many, many books I’ve read and I think this is quite naïve actually because we all just try to uncover something.