The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.

Christ himself came down and took possession of me. . . I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God. . . in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my sense nor my imagination had any part: I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love.

It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.

It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom.

Algebra and money are essentially levelers; the first intellectually, the second effectively.

I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.

One could count on one's fingers the number of scientists throughout the world with a general idea of the history and development of their particular science: there is none who is really competent as regards sciences other than his own. As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, scientists, but only drudges doing scientific work.