To write the true natural history of the world, we should need to be able to follow it from within. It would thus appear no longer as an interlocking succession of structural types replacing one another, but as an ascension of inner sap spreading out in a forest of consolidated instincts. Right at its base, the living world is constituted by conscious clothes in flesh and bone.

The zest for life, which is the source of all passion and all insight, even divine, does not come to us from ourselves.... It is God who has to give us the impulse of wanting him.

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

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.

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.

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

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.