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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINTruly, 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.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
-
-
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
All I know is that, thanks to a sort of habit which has always been ingrained in me, I have never, at any moment of my life, experienced the least difficulty in addressing myself to God as to a supreme Someone.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
For me, the real earth is that chosen part of the universe, still almost universally dispersed and in course of gradual segregation, but which is little by little taking on body and form in Christ.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
There is neither spirit nor matter in the world. The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
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.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Humanity 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 -
My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN -
Religion, 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 CHARDIN -
The 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 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