The incomparable greatness of the religions of the East lies in their having been second to none in vibrating with the passion for unity.
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.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Everywhere 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 CHARDIN -
I 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 CHARDIN -
Certain 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 CHARDIN -
By the sole fact of his entering into ‘Thought,’ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.’
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
No longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Surely 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 CHARDIN -
My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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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Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN






