All ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINAll ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINPersonal 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 CHARDINIt is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a . We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINHowever 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.’
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINThe only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINFor 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 CHARDINHow 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?
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINCertain though I am – and ever more certain – that I must press on in life as though Christ awaited me at the term of the universe, at the same time I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ. Believing is not seeing. As much as anyone, I imagine, I walk in the shadows of faith.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINNo longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINPurity, in spite of outward appearances, is essentially an active virtue, because it concentrates God in us and on those who are subject to our influence.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINSurely the wake left behind by mankind’s forward march reveals its movement just as clearly as the spray thrown up elsewhere by the prow.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINThe earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediately made use of and recast into something naturally directed.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINI 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 CHARDINLove 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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINThe world is round so that friendship may encircle it.
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 CHARDIN