I don’t mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINNothing can resist the person who smiles at life.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Religion, born of the earth’s need for the disclosing of a god, is related to and co-extensive with not the individual man, but the whole of mankind.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and ‘superlive,’ as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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 cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Certain though I am – and ever more certain – that I must press on in life as though Christ awaited me at the term of the universe, at the same time I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ. Believing is not seeing. As much as anyone, I imagine, I walk in the shadows of faith.
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 -
The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confine himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it the strength to escape from it.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
The paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, and of unity with multitude – all these are called Utopian, and yet they are biologically necessary.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
All I know is that, thanks to a sort of habit which has always been ingrained in me, I have never, at any moment of my life, experienced the least difficulty in addressing myself to God as to a supreme Someone.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Surely the wake left behind by mankind’s forward march reveals its movement just as clearly as the spray thrown up elsewhere by the prow.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
For ninety per cent of those who view him from outside, the Christian God looks like a great landowner administering his estates, the world. Now this conventional picture, which is too well justified by appearances, corresponds in no way to the dogmatic basis or point of view of the Gospels.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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 CHARDIN -
In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
There they concentrate, little by little, all that is purest and most attractive in them without loss and without danger of subsequent corruption.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first ‘feeling’ for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.
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 -
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 -
To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN