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 CHARDINThe 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.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
-
-
Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
I would like to express the thoughts of a man who, having finally penetrated the partitions and ceilings of little countries, little coteries, little sects, rises above all these categories and finds himself a child and citizen of the Earth.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
The incomparable greatness of the religions of the East lies in their having been second to none in vibrating with the passion for unity.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other’s encroachments.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power..
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
When death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Through fidelity, we situate ourselves and maintain ourselves in the hands of God so exactly as to become one with them in their action.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Being happy is a matter of personal taste.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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 -
Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
At the extreme temperature occurring in the stars, matter can only survive in its most dissociated states. Only simple bodies exist on these incandescent stars.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
How 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 CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
I came to China to follow my star and to steep myself in the raw regions of the universe.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN