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.
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
-
-
To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
The incomparable greatness of the religions of the East lies in their having been second to none in vibrating with the passion for unity.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
No other substance but this could have produced the human molecule.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
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 -
At the extreme temperature occurring in the stars, matter can only survive in its most dissociated states. Only simple bodies exist on these incandescent stars.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
In the divine milieu, all the elements of the universe touch each other by that which is most inward and ultimate in them.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.
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 -
The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‘renouncing’ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ in the usual meaning of the words.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Truly, there is a Christian note which makes the whole World vibrate, like an immense gong, in the divine Christ. This note is unique and universal, and in it alone consists the Gospel.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‘Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.’
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 -
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 -
Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.
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 -
All ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
I don’t mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
There is neither spirit nor matter in the world. The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN