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" 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. "

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" 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

Child

Age

Mother

" 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.' "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Childhood

" 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

Great

Universe

Nature

" It seems to me that terrestrial beings, as they become more autonomous, psychologically richer, shut themselves up in a way against one another, and at the same time gradually become strangers to the cosmic environment and currents, impenetrable to one another, and incapable of exteriorizing themselves. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Way

Strangers

" 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

Society

Love

" 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

Going

Matter

Warm

" 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. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Down

Spiritual

Long

" Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Almost

Isolated

" Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Old

Growing

Growing Old

" We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power. But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary. So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Power

Passion

Waiting

" For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Many

Die

Ideas

" He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Believe

Head

Only

" 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

Process

Force

Evolution

" 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. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Know

Transformation

World

" Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Evolution

Facts

" 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

Experience

Unique

Thought

" 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 Chardin

Behind

Movement

" We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Forever

You

Will

" 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. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Skeleton

Way

Universe

" We must accept what science tells us, that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world - not only his flesh and bones but his incredible power of thought. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man

Thought

World

" 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

Creation

Humanity

Side

" 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. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Smile

Life

Grandfather

" 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

Past

Backwards

Nature

" 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. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Human

Discovery

Understanding

" 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

Love

Guidance

Surrender

" 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

Character

Universe

Stars

" 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. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Words

Faith

History

" 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. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Done

Words

Said

" Being happy is a matter of personal taste. "

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Being Happy

Personal

Matter

" 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

Others

Self

Most