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 CHARDINThe world is round so that friendship may encircle it.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
The problem of evil, that is to say the reconciling of our failures, even the purely physical ones, with creative goodness and creative power, will always remain one of the most disturbing mysteries of the universe for both our hearts and our minds.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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 -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Being happy is a matter of personal taste.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.
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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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Whether 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.
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To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
For me, the Immaculate Conception is the feast of ‘passive action,’ the action that functions simply by the transmission through us of divine energy.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
When death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
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 -
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 -
Through fidelity, we situate ourselves and maintain ourselves in the hands of God so exactly as to become one with them in their action.
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What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN