“There is a pressing need to understand our technological destiny from principles more comprehensive than its own. This need lifts us up to ask about the great western experiment in a more than piecemeal way. It pushes us to try to understand its meaning in terms of some openness to the whole which is not simply sustenance for the further realisation of that experiment. But the exigency of our need for understanding must not blind us to the tightening circle in which we find ourselves. We are called to understand technological civilisation just when its very realisation has radically put in question the possibility that there could be any such understanding.”

“We are greatly in need of specific research in this area of schizophrenic experience to help us understand Mesolithic man.”

“Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.”

“We experience moments in which we accept ourselves, because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we. If only more such moments were given us! For it is such moments that make us love our life, that make us accept ourselves, not in our goodness and self-complacency, but in our certainty of the eternal meaning of our life.”

“God understands that part of us which is more than what we think we are.”

“We cannot inherit a fixed, unmoving view of life and of art from the past generation. The expression of art is in any period different, as are our experiences. A new experience creates a new form. We like to learn all we need from earlier generations, but we have to find out for ourselves what we need; nobody else can do that for us. It is not our business to receive and work on what the earlier generation might want us to work on. On the other hand, it is its business to help us where we want its help.”

“We need a much deeper understanding of exactly what it is our industrial society, in its present creation, is jeopardizing. We need a more profound perception of what is at stake.”

“Let us bring the question to the test of experience and fact; and ask ourselves, considering our nature in its entire extent, what light we derive from a sustained and comprehensive view of its component parts, which may enable us to assert with certainty that we do or do not live after death.”

“Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles. In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.”

“Our culture has a universal myth in which we see emotion as more complex and obscure than intellect. Indeed, emotion might be "deeper" in some sense of prior evolution, but this need not make it harder to understand; in fact, I think today we actually know much more about emotion than about reason.”