“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.”

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.

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.