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 CHARDINIs 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.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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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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Let man live at a distance from God, and the universe remains neutral or hostile to him. But let man believe in God, and immediately all around him the elements, even the irksome, of the inevitable organize themselves into a friendly whole, ordered to the ultimate success of life.
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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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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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Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.
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Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual 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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To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?
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For me, the Immaculate Conception is the feast of ‘passive action,’ the action that functions simply by the transmission through us of divine energy.
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By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross.
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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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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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The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one’s self to others.
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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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No longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
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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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Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.
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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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Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human.
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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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Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.
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Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.
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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.
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Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.
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Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.
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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