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

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.

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.

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.’

You don’t make Him Lord. He’s Lord already. You just recognize it.

If I haven’t had any long term psychological side effects from all the things I’ve already done on this show, this isn’t gonna hurt much more.

The best of them will work alone, already a part of the enemy camp, and in chameleon-like style master the fifth-column algorithms to subvert the ancient regime.

I only translate authors whose work already interests me as a reader, and that’s a decision I make based on multiple encounters with an author’s work.

Often people who already had an interest in human rights work.

The Futurists?…. Well, of course, they are already past.

To attain union is so impossibly difficult because it is impossible to become what you already are! Union is nothing other than knowledge of oneself as the Only One.

Dubai’s world class physical infrastructure has already established it as a major player in terms of trade tourism and as the leading conference and exhibition venue in this part of the world.