He that is kind is free, though he is a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king.

He that is jealous is not in love.

We cannot pass our guardian angel's bounds, resigned or sullen, he will hear our sighs.

God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.

Will is to grace as the horse is to the rider.

He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent.

If we did not have rational souls, we would not be able to believe.

Thou hast created us for Thyself, and our heart is not quiet until it rests in Thee.

This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfections.

Don't you believe that there is in man a deep so profound as to be hidden even to him in whom it is?

Certain though I am - and ever more certain - that I must press on in life as though Christ awaited me at the term of the universe, at the same time I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ. Believing is not seeing. As much as anyone, I imagine, I walk in the shadows of faith.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

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.

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.

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

All ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances.

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and 'superlive,' as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.

When all is said and done, what constitutes the impregnable superiority of Christianity over all other types of Faith is that it is ever more consciously identified with a Christogenesis: in other words, with an awareness of the rise of a certain universal Presence which is at once immortalizing and unifying.

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.'

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.

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

By the sole fact of his entering into 'Thought,' man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

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