When humans truly discover the power of love, it will prove more important than the harnessing of fire.

Specialisation paralyses, ultra-specialisation kills. Palaeontology is littered with such catastrophes.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

The stars are laboratories in which the evolution of matter proceeds in the direction of large molecules.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.

The human person is the sum total of a 15 billion year chain of unbroken evolution now thinking about itself

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

A breeze passes in the night. When did it spring up? Whence does it come? Whither is it going? No man knows.

The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity.

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.

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

By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.

For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.

Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution.

Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.

One mustn't close one's eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one.

Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.

You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.

Each elect soul ... possesses God directly and finds in that unique possession the fulfillment of his own individuality.

In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.

A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

Man only progresses by slowly elaborating from age to age the essence and the totality of a universe deposited within him.

I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.

What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but identifying them.

The most empowering relationships are those in which each partner lifts the other to a higher possession of their own being.

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

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

The day is not far distant when humanity will realize that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration.

Mankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalisation.

The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love.

Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.

Instead of standing on the shore and proving to ourselves that the ocean cannot carry us, let us venture on its waters just to see.

Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.

Long before the awakening of thought on earth, manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which have no parallel today.

Mankind is still embryonic ... [man is] the bud from which something more complicated and more centered than man himself should emerge.

Through fidelity, we situate ourselves and maintain ourselves in the hands of God so exactly as to become one with them in their action.

Surely the wake left behind by mankind's forward march reveals its movement just as clearly as the spray thrown up elsewhere by the prow.

God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my (pick) shovel, my paint brush, my (sewing) needle - and my heart and thoughts.

Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.

In the spiritual life, as in all organic processes, everyone has their optimum and it is just as harmful to go beyond it as not to attain it.

At the heart of every being lies creation's dream of a principle that will one day give organic form to its fragmented treasures. God is unity.

We had thought that we were human beings making a spiritual journey; it may be truer to say that we are spiritual beings making a human journey.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

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.

Share This Page