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 CHARDINTo 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.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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 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 -
Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‘escape of energy,’ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Being happy is a matter of personal taste.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
We shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
No longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
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 -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Long before the awakening of thought on earth, manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which have no parallel today.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN