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 CHARDINWe often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers – a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other’s encroachments.
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Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society.
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Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity.
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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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Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.
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To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.
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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.
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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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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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Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.
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These seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.
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Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge .
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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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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 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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I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.
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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.
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We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.
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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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN