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 CHARDINIf we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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The soft climate and luxuriance of the tropics; the greenness, the fragrance, the flowers – extraordinary flowers covering the tallest trees and turning them into huge bouquets.
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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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The only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.
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My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.
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The paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, and of unity with multitude – all these are called Utopian, and yet they are biologically necessary.
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Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.
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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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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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Whether one welcomes or deplores it, nothing is more surely and exactly characteristic of modern times than the irresistible invasion of the human world by technology. Mechanism invading like a tide all the places of the earth and all forms of social activity.
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Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples.
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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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To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.
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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.
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To 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.
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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 Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.
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The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.
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In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.
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We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
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Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN