But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINTo 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.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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.
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How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?
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The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.
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Nothing can resist the person who smiles at life.
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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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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.
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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.
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We 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.
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In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions.
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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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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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In the divine milieu, all the elements of the universe touch each other by that which is most inward and ultimate in them.
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The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.
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Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.
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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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We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of 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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Truly, there is a Christian note which makes the whole World vibrate, like an immense gong, in the divine Christ. This note is unique and universal, and in it alone consists the Gospel.
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By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross.
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What I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore.
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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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Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.
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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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN