The problem of evil, that is to say the reconciling of our failures, even the purely physical ones, with creative goodness and creative power, will always remain one of the most disturbing mysteries of the universe for both our hearts and our minds.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINSo long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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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 mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.
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.
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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.
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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 -
We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers – a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.
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When death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
What I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore.
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I came to China to follow my star and to steep myself in the raw regions of the universe.
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Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.
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 -
Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity.
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We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.
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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