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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINDeath 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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINLove is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINHumanity 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.
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINI feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‘escape of energy,’ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINThe 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 CHARDINEver 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 CHARDINHe that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINIn the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINI 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 CHARDINEverywhere 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 CHARDINLove is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINRegarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINReligion, 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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINThe universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINI owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN