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 CHARDINIf 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.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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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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Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge .
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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.
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For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.
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We have but one permanent home: heaven – that’s still the old truth that we always have to re-learn – and it’s only through the impact of sad experiences that we assimilate it.
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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.
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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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I came to China to follow my star and to steep myself in the raw regions of the universe.
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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.
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This note, which is essential to every form of mysticism, has even penetrated them so deeply that we find ourselves falling under a spell simply by uttering the names of their Gods.
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The facts tell us that no religious Faith releases – or ever has released at any moment in History – a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification than the Christianity of our own day – and the more Catholic it is, the truer my words.
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What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.
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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’.
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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.
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It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a . We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN