At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first ‘feeling’ for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.
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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Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.
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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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One mustn’t close one’s eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one.
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The profoundly ‘atomic’ character of the universe is visible in everyday experience, in raindrops and grains of sand, in the hosts of the living, and the multitude of stars; even in the ashes of the dead.
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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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But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary.
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Purity, in spite of outward appearances, is essentially an active virtue, because it concentrates God in us and on those who are subject to our influence.
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I greatly enjoyed the Hawaiian Islands. They are a real little paradise in spite of the influx of Americans who have made it one of their most pleasant ‘centers of resort’.
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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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Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples.
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Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
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Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity.
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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.
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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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Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.
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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.
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All I know is that, thanks to a sort of habit which has always been ingrained in me, I have never, at any moment of my life, experienced the least difficulty in addressing myself to God as to a supreme Someone.
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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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The incomparable greatness of the religions of the East lies in their having been second to none in vibrating with the passion for unity.
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The facts tell us that no religious Faith releases – or ever has released at any moment in History – a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification than the Christianity of our own day – and the more Catholic it is, the truer my words.
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How 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.
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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.
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My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.
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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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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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At the heart of every being lies creation’s dream of a principle that will one day give organic form to its fragmented treasures. God is unity.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN