Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!
1
What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.
2
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.
3
If 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.
4
In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
5
Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.
6
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
7
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.
8
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.
9
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.
10
I came to China to follow my star and to steep myself in the raw regions of the universe.
11
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.
12
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.
13
Through fidelity, we situate ourselves and maintain ourselves in the hands of God so exactly as to become one with them in their action.
14
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.
15
Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
16
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.
17
Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.
18
From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.
19
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.
20
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.
21
Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since, when death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God.
22
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.
23
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.
24
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.
25
My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.
26
At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first ‘feeling’ for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.
27
Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.
28
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.
29
The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one’s self to others.
30
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.
31
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.
32
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.
33
The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.
34
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.
35
We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.
36
Being happy is a matter of personal taste.
37
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.
38
To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?
39
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.
40
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.
41
Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
42
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.
43
The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.
44
Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.
45
Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.
46
A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.
47
By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.
48
It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway.
49
Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since, when death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God.
50
I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‘escape of energy,’ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.
51
Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
52
To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.
53
Long before the awakening of thought on earth, manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which have no parallel today.
54
Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.
55
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.
56
Neither the Christian attitude of love for all mankind nor humane hopes for an organized society must cause us to forget that the ‘human stratum’ may not be homogeneous.
57
There is neither spirit nor matter in the world. The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could have produced the human molecule.
58
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.
59
I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.
60
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.
61
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
62
He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.
63
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.
64
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.
65
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.
66
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.
67
We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.
68
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.
69
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.
70
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.
71
In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.
72
The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.
73
Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.
74
Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.
75
Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.
