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 CHARDINFor ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.
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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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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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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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The history of the kingdom of God is, directly, one of a reunion. The total divine milieu is formed by the incorporation of every elected spirit in Jesus Christ.
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Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society.
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These seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.
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What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.
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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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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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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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The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.
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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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Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.
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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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No other substance but this could have produced the human molecule.
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If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions.
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There is neither spirit nor matter in the world. The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter.
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Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.
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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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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.’
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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.
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How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.
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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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At 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.
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One mustn’t close one’s eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN