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 CHARDINIt is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
-
-
The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Nothing can resist the person who smiles at life.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
No other substance but this could have produced the human molecule.
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge .
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 -
The profoundly ‘atomic’ character of the universe is visible in everyday experience, in raindrops and grains of sand, in the hosts of the living, and the multitude of stars; even in the ashes of the dead.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Whether one welcomes or deplores it, nothing is more surely and exactly characteristic of modern times than the irresistible invasion of the human world by technology. Mechanism invading like a tide all the places of the earth and all forms of social activity.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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 -
I greatly enjoyed the Hawaiian Islands. They are a real little paradise in spite of the influx of Americans who have made it one of their most pleasant ‘centers of resort’.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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 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 -
Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.
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 -
But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary.
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 -
In the divine milieu, all the elements of the universe touch each other by that which is most inward and ultimate in them.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
The only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN