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 CHARDINMankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
-
-
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
By the sole fact of his entering into ‘Thought,’ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought if one does achieve them, or worth worrying about if they evade one or are slow in coming. All that is really worth while is action – faithful action, for the world, and in God.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
No longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Purity, in spite of outward appearances, is essentially an active virtue, because it concentrates God in us and on those who are subject to our influence.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.
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 -
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






