Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:
"The immense hazard and the immense blindess of the world are only an illusion."
"Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within."
"Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed."
Max Picard in The World of Silence:
"In the pictures of the old masters, people seem as though they had just come out of the opening in a wall; as if they had wriggled their way out with difficulty. They seem unsafe and hesitant because they have come out too far and still belong more to silence than themselves."
One Midrash:
"What a person arrives in the world as a baby, his hands are clenched as though to say, "Everything is mine. I will inherit it all." When he departs from the world, his hands are open, as though to say, "I have acquired nothing from this world." (Or, I might add, everything, and our hands are open to hold it.)
Giacometti:
"The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is."