Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINAt the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first ‘feeling’ for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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The paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, and of unity with multitude – all these are called Utopian, and yet they are biologically necessary.
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The incomparable greatness of the religions of the East lies in their having been second to none in vibrating with the passion for unity.
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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.
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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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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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Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity.
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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.
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It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.
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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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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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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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To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.
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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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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 world is round so that friendship may encircle it.
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I greatly enjoyed the Hawaiian Islands. They are a real little paradise in spite of the influx of Americans who have made it one of their most pleasant ‘centers of resort’.
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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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Religion, born of the earth’s need for the disclosing of a god, is related to and co-extensive with not the individual man, but the whole of mankind.
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The profoundly ‘atomic’ character of the universe is visible in everyday experience, in raindrops and grains of sand, in the hosts of the living, and the multitude of stars; even in the ashes of the dead.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN