Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes And Sayings

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ was a French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of Peking Man. He conceived the idea of the Omega Point and developed Vladimir Vernadsky’s concept of noosphere. During his lifetime, many of Teilhard’s writings were censored by the Catholic Church because of his views on original sin. Recently Teilhard has been praised by Pope Benedict XVI and other eminent Catholic figures. The response to his writings by evolutionary biologists has been, with some exceptions, decidedly negative.

The Most Satisfying Thing In Life Is To Have Been Able To Give A Large Part Of One's Self To Others.

I Would Like To Express The Thoughts Of A Man Who, Having Finally Penetrated The Partitions And Ceilings Of Little Countries, Little Coteries, Little Sects, Rises Above All These Categories And Finds Himself A Child And Citizen Of The Earth.

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.

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.

Have You Ever Thought How Humiliating And Distressing It Was To Be Placed Upon A Sphere? For Friendship It Is A Boon Never To Be Able To Be Further Apart Than The Antipodes. But Suppose That You Are Leaving Together To Go On And On; It Is Impossible. To Go Beyond A Certain Point Is To Return To Where You Began.

My Roots Are In Paris, And I Will Not Pull Them Up.

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.

I Owe The Best Of Myself To Geology, But Everything It Has Taught Me Tends To Turn Me Away From Dead Things.

I Came To China To Follow My Star And To Steep Myself In The Raw Regions Of The Universe.

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.

Everyone, No Doubt, Remains First And Foremost A Man Of His Own Country And Continues To Draw From It His Motive Force.

The Longer I Live, The More I Feel That True Repose Consists In 'Renouncing' One's Own Self, By Which I Mean Making Up One's Mind To Admit That There Is No Importance Whatever In Being 'Happy' Or 'Unhappy' In The Usual Meaning Of The Words.

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.

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.

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.

Death Is Acceptable Only If It Represents The Physically Necessary Passage Toward A Union, The Condition Of A Metamorphosis.

We Are One, After All, You And I, Together We Suffer, Together Exist And Forever Will Recreate Each Other.

Love Is An Adventure And A Conquest. It Survives And Develops, Like The Universe Itself, Only By Perpetual Discovery.

It Doesn't Matter If The Water Is Cold Or Warm If You're Going To Have To Wade Through It Anyway.

I Greatly Enjoyed The Hawaiian Islands. They Are A Real Little Paradise In Spite Of The Influx Of Americans Who Have Made It One Of Their Most Pleasant 'Centers Of Resort': 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.

The Universe As We Know It Is A Joint Product Of The Observer And The Observed.

Driven By The Forces Of Love, The Fragments Of The World Seek Each Other So That The World May Come To Being.

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.

Man Can Be Understood Only By Ascending From Physics, Chemistry, Biology, And Geology. In Other Words, He Is First Of All A Cosmic Problem.

Nothing Can Resist The Person Who Smiles At Life - I Don't Mean The Ironic And Disillusioned Smile Of My Grandfather, But The Triumphant Smile Of The Person Who Knows That He Will Survive, Or That At Least He Will Be Saved By What Seems To Be Destroying Him.

He That Will Believe Only What He Can Fully Comprehend Must Have A Long Head Or A Very Short Creed.

Historically, The Stuff Of The Universe Goes On Becoming Concentrated Into Ever More Organized Forms Of Matter.

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.

If There Is One Thing I Fear Less Than Everything Else, It Is, I Believe, Persecution For My Opinions. 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.

Is Evolution A Theory, A System, Or An Hypothesis? It Is Much More: It Is A General Condition To Which All Theories, All Hypotheses, All Systems Must Bow And Which They Must Satisfy Henceforward If They Are To Be Thinkable And True.

Being Happy Is A Matter Of Personal Taste.

Being Happy Is A Matter Of Personal Taste.

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.

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.

I Have Finally Decided To Write My Book On The Spiritual Life. I Mean To Put Down As Simply As Possible The Sort Of Ascetical Or Mystical Teaching That I Have Been Living And Preaching So Long. I Call It 'Le Milieu Divin,' But I Am Being Careful To Include Nothing Esoteric And The Minimum Of Explicit Philosophy.

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.

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.

The Mineral World Is A Much More Supple And Mobile World Than Could Be Imagined By The Science Of The Ancients. Vaguely Analogous To The Metamorphoses Of Living Creatures, There Occurs In The Most Solid Rocks, As We Now Know, Perpetual Transformation Of A Mineral Species.

I Am Not Enough Of A Mathematician To Be Able To Judge Either The Well-foundedness Or The Limits Of Relativity In Physics.

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.

Regarded Zoologically, Man Is Today An Almost Isolated Figure In Nature. In His Cradle, He Was Less Isolated.

From A Purely Positivist Point Of View, Man Is The Most Mysterious And Disconcerting Of All The Objects Met With By Science.

The Earth's Crust Has Not Yet Stopped Heaving And Plunging Under Our Feet. Mountain Ranges Are Still Being Thrust Up On The Horizon. Granites Are Still Growing Under The Continental Masses. Nor Has The Organic World Ceased To Produce New Buds At The Tips Of Its Countless Branches.

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.

Long Before The Awakening Of Thought On Earth, Manifestations Of Cosmic Energy Must Have Been Produced Which Have No Parallel Today.

The World Is Round So That Friendship May Encircle It.

Evolution Is A Light Illuminating All Facts, A Curve That All Lines Must Follow.

Deep Down, There Is In The Substance Of The Cosmos A Primordial Disposition, Sui Generis, For Self-arrangement And Self-involution.

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.

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.'