Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
5
Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
6
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
7
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
10
I came to China to follow my star and to steep myself in the raw regions of the universe.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
17
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
18
From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
25
My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
27
Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
29
The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one’s self to others.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
33
The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
35
We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
36
Being happy is a matter of personal taste.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
38
To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
39
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
41
Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
43
The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
45
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
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
48
It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
51
Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
52
To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
53
Long before the awakening of thought on earth, manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which have no parallel today.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
54
Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
59
I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
61
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
62
He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
67
We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
71
In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
73
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
74
Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin