Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved.

Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

To say that Christ is the term and motive force of evolution, to say that he manifests himself as ‚evolver,‘ is implicitly to recognize that he becomes attainable in and through the whole process of evolution.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than what they think laughable.

Non-violence is the article of faith.

I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

We need to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion. This isn’t a matter of political correctness. It’s a matter of understanding what makes us strong. The world respects us not just for our arsenal; it respects us for our diversity and our openness and the way we respect every faith.

We moralize among ruins.

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

‚Pure experience‘ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

Real Christianity can be summed up in two commands: Love God, and love people.

Really, I have to laugh because there was a whole set of stories that made me sound like the Dragon Lady, you know, ‚tough this and tough that.‘ Then there is this business about ‚gooey.‘ The bottom line is I am a pragmatic idealist.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

I don’t believe in God but I’m very interested in her.

Life every man holds dear; but the dear man holds honor far more precious dear than life.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

A beautiful homily, a genuine sermon, must begin with the first proclamation, with the proclamation of salvation. There is nothing more solid, deep and sure than this proclamation.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

Christ was God in human flesh, and He proved it by rising from the dead.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Christianity supplies a Hell for the people who disagree with you and a Heaven for your friends.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

When you become a Christian, something truly amazing happens: God comes to live inside your heart. You become the home of God.

I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

The Christian’s Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist. Our existence is beyond our understanding. No one has an answer.