If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.
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.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions.
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A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music.
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What I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore.
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When death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God.
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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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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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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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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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Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.
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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.
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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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Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought if one does achieve them, or worth worrying about if they evade one or are slow in coming. All that is really worth while is action – faithful action, for the world, and in God.
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The 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.
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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 ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.
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Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.
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The paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, and of unity with multitude – all these are called Utopian, and yet they are biologically necessary.
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Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society.
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Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
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We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.
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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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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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In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.
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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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Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN