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 CHARDINThe universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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The soft climate and luxuriance of the tropics; the greenness, the fragrance, the flowers – extraordinary flowers covering the tallest trees and turning them into huge bouquets.
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So 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.
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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.
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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.
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What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.
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Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.
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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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Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.
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Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.
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Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.
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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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There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me – I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction.
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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.
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In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.
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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 CHARDIN