Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINThe 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.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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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.
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Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.
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Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.
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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 earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediately made use of and recast into something naturally directed.
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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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We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
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Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.
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Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.
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I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.
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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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I came to China to follow my star and to steep myself in the raw regions of the universe.
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We shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
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No longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
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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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The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.
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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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By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross.
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There is neither spirit nor matter in the world. The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter.
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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.’
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Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.
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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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It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.
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 -
A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and ‘superlive,’ as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.
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For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN