Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINNo longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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At the heart of every being lies creation’s dream of a principle that will one day give organic form to its fragmented treasures. God is unity.
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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.
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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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Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.
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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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When death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God.
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But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary.
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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.
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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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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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The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confine himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it the strength to escape from it.
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I would like to express the thoughts of a man who, having finally penetrated the partitions and ceilings of little countries, little coteries, little sects, rises above all these categories and finds himself a child and citizen of the Earth.
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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.
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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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It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN






