Is 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 CHARDINIf there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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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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I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.
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Surely the wake left behind by mankind’s forward march reveals its movement just as clearly as the spray thrown up elsewhere by the prow.
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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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These seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.
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Long before the awakening of thought on earth, manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which have no parallel today.
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Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge .
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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?
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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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To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?
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To say that Christ is the term and motive force of evolution, to say that he manifests himself as ‘evolver,’ is implicitly to recognize that he becomes attainable in and through the whole process of evolution.
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Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.
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Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity.
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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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My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.
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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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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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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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Being happy is a matter of personal taste.
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In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.
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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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From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.
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It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a . We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.
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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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To 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.
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For me, the real earth is that chosen part of the universe, still almost universally dispersed and in course of gradual segregation, but which is little by little taking on body and form in Christ.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN