The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINThere 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.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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This note, which is essential to every form of mysticism, has even penetrated them so deeply that we find ourselves falling under a spell simply by uttering the names of their Gods.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
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 -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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 CHARDIN -
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 -
Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
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 -
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.
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 -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN






