QUOTES by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
It 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 homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and 'superlive,' as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
When all is said and done, what constitutes the impregnable superiority of Christianity over all other types of Faith is that it is ever more consciously identified with a Christogenesis: in other words, with an awareness of the rise of a certain universal Presence which is at once immortalizing and unifying.
Quote by -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.'
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Through fidelity, we situate ourselves and maintain ourselves in the hands of God so exactly as to become one with them in their action.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge - the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We have but one permanent home: heaven - that's still the old truth that we always have to re-learn - and it's only through the impact of sad experiences that we assimilate it.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples, 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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Personal 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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The number of known human fossils only increases slowly. But the manner of regarding and assessing them is capable of progressing rapidly, as indeed it does. In the absence of any absolutely sensational discovery in prehistory, there is an up-to-date and scientific manner of understanding man, which is solidly based on palaeontology.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The facts tell us that no religious Faith releases - or ever has released at any moment in History - a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification than the Christianity of our own day - and the more Catholic it is, the truer my words.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The history of the kingdom of God is, directly, one of a reunion. The total divine milieu is formed by the incorporation of every elected spirit in Jesus Christ.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The quantity and quality of consciousness, one may say, have always been growing throughout geological times. In this respect man, in whom nervous organisation and therefore psychological powers have attained an undisputed maximum, may be considered, scientifically, as a natural centre of evolution of the primates.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Long before the awakening of thought on earth, manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which have no parallel today.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
For 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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society. Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other's encroachments.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Let man live at a distance from God, and the universe remains neutral or hostile to him. But let man believe in God, and immediately all around him the elements, even the irksome, of the inevitable organize themselves into a friendly whole, ordered to the ultimate success of life.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Love 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.
Quote by -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin