There was something more: around this sentient protoplasmic layer, an ultimate envelope was beginning to become apparent to me, taking on its own individuality and gradually detaching itself like a luminous aura. This envelope was not only conscious but thinking, and from the time when I first became aware of it, it was always there that I found concentrated, in an ever more dazzling and consistent form, the essence or rather the very Soul of the Earth.

As a result, man is the only successful type which has remained as a single interbreeding group or species, and has not radiated out into a number of biologically separated assemblages.

But this quantum only takes on its full significance when we try to define it with regard to a concrete natural movement – that is to say, in duration.

Research students are numbered in the hundreds of thousands-soon to be millions -and they are no longer distributed superficially and at random over the globe, but are functionally linked together in a vast organic system that will remain in the future indispensable to the life of the community.

So many things which once had distressed or revolted him – the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move – all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness.

Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.

His understanding of the method by which organisms become first individualised and then personalised gave him a number of valuable insights. Basically, the process depends on cephalisation – the differentiation of a head as the dominant guiding region of the body, forwardly directed, and containing the main sense-organs providing information about the outer world and also the main organ of co-ordination or brain.

He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.

Energy is the measure of that which passes from one atom to another in the course of their transformations. A unifying power, then, but also, because the atom appears to become enriched or exhausted in the course of the exchange, the expression of structure.

We now know from neural-net technology that when there are more connections between points in a system, and there is greater strength between these connections, there will be sudden leaps in intelligence, where intelligence is defined as success rate in performing a task.

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.

The world can no more have two summits than a circumference can have two centres.

There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision.

El pasado me ha revelado la estructura del futuro.

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

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

Individual human beings are so subtly developed through the centuries that it is strictly impermissible to compare any two men who are not contemporaries-that is to say are taken from two quite different times.

And now, as a germination of planetary dimensions, comes the thinking layer which over its full extent develops and intertwines its fibres, not to confuse and neutralise them but to reinforce them in the living unity of a single tissue.

It often happens that what stares us in the face is the most difficult to perceive.

The reality of spirit-matter is inevitably translated into and confirmed by a structure of the spirit.

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

At the heart of our universe, each soul exists for God, in our Lord.

Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God.

What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of courage. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but in expressing them correctly; and we can now see that it is biologically undeniable that unless we harness passion to the service of spirit there can be no progress. Sooner or later, then, and in spite of all our incredulity, the world will take this step – because the greater truth always prevails and the greater good emerges in the end.

God is inexhaustibly attainable in the totality of our action.

You must overcome death by finding God in it.

Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves born by a current toward the open seas.

I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life.

More primordial than any idea, beauty will be manifest as the herald and generator or ideas.

At a finite distance in the future, a critical state of encounter will occur, an ultimate co-reflective Center. A focused conspiration will allure individual persons to identify with others in profound affinity. Because of thinking altogether, love will grow into Divinity.

In the shadow of death may we not look back to the past, but seek in utter darkness the dawn of God.

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

For in the nature of things everything that is faith must rise, and everything that rises must converge.

We may, perhaps, imagine that the creation was finished long ago. But that would be quite wrong. It continues still more magnificently, and at the highest levels of the world.

The whole life lies in the verb seeing.

It is done. Once again the Fire has penetrated the earth, not with the sudden crash of thunderbolt, riving the mountain tops: does the Master break down doors to enter His own home? Without earthquake, or thunderclap: the flame has lit up the whole world from within.

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

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

From an evolutionary point of view, man has stopped moving, if he ever did move.

We have only to believe. And the more threatening and irreducible reality appears, the more firmly and desperately we must believe. Then, little by little, we shall see the universal horror unbend, and then smile upon us, and then take us in its more than human arms.

Our century is probably more religious than any other. How could it fail to be, with such problems to be solved? The only trouble is that it has not yet found a God it can adore.

That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question.

To love is to approach each other center to center.

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

The world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus.

This it the greatest success I can dream of for my life: to have spread a new vision of the world.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

God loves everyone in the world who doesn’t love himself. Does God love God?

Since once again, O Lord, in the steppes of Asia, I have no bread, no wine, no altar, I will raise myself above those symbols to the pure majesty of reality, and I will offer to you, I, your priest, upon the altar of the entire earth, the labor and the suffering of the world.

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

Faith has need of the whole truth.

The only way forward is in the direction of a common passion, for nothing in the universe can ultimately resist the cumulative ardor of the collective soul.

Today, something is happening to the whole structure of human consciousness. A fresh kind of life is starting. Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world are seeking each other, so that the world may come into being.

The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe.

The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.

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

The task for us now, if we are to survive, is to build the earth.

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.

By means of all created things, without excaption, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.

The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one’s self to others.

The age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth. The more scientifically I regard the world, the less can I see any possible biological future for it except in the active consciousness of its unity.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

The past has revealed to me the structure of the future.

The dog knows, but does not know that he knows.

Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.

Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.

To see more is to become more.

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

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

Truth has to appear only once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze.

It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway.

Reach beyond your grasp. Your goals should be grand enough to get the best of you.

Not everything is immediately good to those who seek God; but everything is capable of becoming good.

The future is more beautiful than all the pasts.

Everything that rises must converge.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces.

There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.

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

We are collaborators in creation.

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

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

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

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.

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.

Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.

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

Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.

Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mystical of cosmic forces. Love is the primal and universal psychic energy. Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.

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 most powerful and still most unknown energy in the world.

Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.

Above all trust in the slow work of God. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.

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