For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINFor ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINThe 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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINTo 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 CHARDINWe are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINI don’t mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINMy roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINI owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINBy its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINIt cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINIs evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINGrowing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINHow 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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINHow can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINEveryone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINWhether 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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINI 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