If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINWhether one welcomes or deplores it, nothing is more surely and exactly characteristic of modern times than the irresistible invasion of the human world by technology. Mechanism invading like a tide all the places of the earth and all forms of social activity.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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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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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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For ninety per cent of those who view him from outside, the Christian God looks like a great landowner administering his estates, the world. Now this conventional picture, which is too well justified by appearances, corresponds in no way to the dogmatic basis or point of view of the Gospels.
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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.
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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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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.
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The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.
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We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
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It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.
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The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.
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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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At the heart of every being lies creation’s dream of a principle that will one day give organic form to its fragmented treasures. God is unity.
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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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A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and ‘superlive,’ as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.
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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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All I know is that, thanks to a sort of habit which has always been ingrained in me, I have never, at any moment of my life, experienced the least difficulty in addressing myself to God as to a supreme Someone.
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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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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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So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort.
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.
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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.
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My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.
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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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The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confine himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it the strength to escape from it.
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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.
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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