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.
He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.
Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.
We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers - a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.
The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confine himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it the strength to escape from it.
Christ has conquered death, not only by suppressing its evil effects, but by reversing its sting. By virtue of Christ's rising again, nothing any longer kills inevitably, but everything is capable of becoming the blessed touch of the divine hands, the blessed influence of the will of God upon our lives.
Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.
Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society. Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other's encroachments.
Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.
Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge - the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.
Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.
If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions. 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.
Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.
In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.
Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.
By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.
Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.
We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power. But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary. So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort.
Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.
Nothing can resist the person who smiles at life - I don't mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him.
