However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‘Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.’
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINSomeday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
I would like to express the thoughts of a man who, having finally penetrated the partitions and ceilings of little countries, little coteries, little sects, rises above all these categories and finds himself a child and citizen of the Earth.
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There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me – I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction.
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Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.
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Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since.
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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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.
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Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.
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The soft climate and luxuriance of the tropics; the greenness, the fragrance, the flowers – extraordinary flowers covering the tallest trees and turning them into huge bouquets.
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No longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
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Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.
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Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.
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If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions.
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There is neither spirit nor matter in the world. The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter.
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I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.
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Truly, there is a Christian note which makes the whole World vibrate, like an immense gong, in the divine Christ. This note is unique and universal, and in it alone consists the Gospel.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.
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All ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
At the extreme temperature occurring in the stars, matter can only survive in its most dissociated states. Only simple bodies exist on these incandescent stars.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
For me, the Immaculate Conception is the feast of ‘passive action,’ the action that functions simply by the transmission through us of divine energy.
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But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‘escape of energy,’ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN