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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINTo discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.
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Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.
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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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Religion, born of the earth’s need for the disclosing of a god, is related to and co-extensive with not the individual man, but the whole of mankind.
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By the sole fact of his entering into ‘Thought,’ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.
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Neither the Christian attitude of love for all mankind nor humane hopes for an organized society must cause us to forget that the ‘human stratum’ may not be homogeneous.
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Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since.
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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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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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In the divine milieu, all the elements of the universe touch each other by that which is most inward and ultimate in them.
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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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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 is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.
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The only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.
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For ninety per cent of those who view him from outside, the Christian God looks like a great landowner administering his estates, the world. Now this conventional picture, which is too well justified by appearances, corresponds in no way to the dogmatic basis or point of view of the Gospels.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN