It is impossible to exaggerate how much better the formula es denkt in mir is than cogito ergo sum, which lets us in for pure subjectivism.

Metaphysics is a science.

It is right that we be concerned with the scientific probity of metaphysics.

Freedom is a conquest, always partial, always precarious, always challenged … the freest person is the one with the most hope.

This detachment (poverty, chastity, etc.) must not be mere amputation; everything which is shaken off must be simultaneously found again at a higher level.

The greatest merit of the critical spirit is that it tends to cure fanaticism, and it is logical enough that in our own fanatical times the critical spirit should tend to disappear.

No two beings, and no two situations, are really commensurable with each other. To become aware of this fact is to undergo a sort of crisis. But it is with this crisis in our moral awareness as a starting-point, that there becomes possible that cry from us towards the creative principle, and that demand by it on us, which each must answer in his own way.

There can be no whole without a thought which grasps it as a whole; and this grasping of what is before the mind as a whole can be effected only by a sort of voluntary halt in a kind of progressive movement of thought.

We are living in a world which seems to be founded on the refusal to reflect.

An individual is not distinct from his place. He is his place.

On a grassroots level we say that man can touch more than he can grasp.

Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me

But however measurable, there is much more life in music than mathematics or logic ever dreamed of.

But a science is exact to the extent that its method measures up to and is adequate to its object.

Contemporary thinkers would say that man is continuously transcending himself.

Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics.

The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction.

The striking thing about the Precious Blood is the bond it establishes between love and suffering in our experience, a bond that has become so close that we have come to think of suffering accepted with joy as the most authentic sign of love with any depth at all.

Contemplation and wisdom are highest achievements and man is not totally at home with them.

The deepest longing of the human heart is for communion with others and with the transcendent.

Philosophy is not an abstract intellectual exercise, but a concrete engagement with the fundamental questions of human existence.

To be inauthentic is to live a life devoid of meaning and purpose; it is to lose touch with one’s true self and become alienated from oneself and others.

Hope is not the same as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.

Man’s nature is not separated from his existence. Existence is not a static thing, but a continuous movement towards self-formation.

Philosophy is experience transmitted into thought.

The wise man knows how to run his life so that contemplation is possible.

We must, therefore, break away once and for all from the metaphors which depict consciousness as a luminous circle round which there is nothing, to its own eyes, but darkness. On the contrary, the shadow is at the centre.

My freedom is not and cannot be something that I observe as I observe an outward fact; rather it must be something that I decide, moreover, without appeal. It is beyond the power of anyone to reject the decision by which I assert my freedom and this assertion is ultimately bound up with the consciousness that I have of myself.

The atheist relies not on an experience but on an idea, or pseudo idea, of God: if God existed, He would have such and such characteristics; but if he had such characteristics, He could not allow etc…His judgment of incompability, in fact, is based on a judgment of implications.

I not only have a body; I am this body.

I almost think that hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism. Where hope is lacking the soul dries up and withers.

Being and having in our society teaches us how to take possession of things, when it should rather initiate us in the art of letting go. For there is neither freedom nor real life without an apprenticeship in letting go.

You know you have loved someone when you have glimpsed in them that which is too beautiful to die.

A mystery is a problem that encroaches upon itself because the questioner becomes the object of the question. Getting to Mars is a problem. Falling in love is a mystery.