Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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
Love
Fact
World
" 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
" 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
Me
Sun
Well
" What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle. "
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Than
Greater
Handle
" 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
Hands
God
Become
" 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
Always
Nature
Know
" 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
" 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
" Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis. "
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Union
Passage
Death
" For me, the Immaculate Conception is the feast of 'passive action,' the action that functions simply by the transmission through us of divine energy. Purity, in spite of outward appearances, is essentially an active virtue, because it concentrates God in us and on those who are subject to our influence. "
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Me
God
Action
" 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. "
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Laws
Born
Earth
" 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. "
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Humanity
Ancestors
Know
" Being happy is a matter of personal taste. "
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Being Happy
Personal
Matter
" 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
" 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
" It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist. "
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Men
Men And Women
Duty
" 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
Matter
Universe
World
" 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. "
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Meaning
Self
Words
" 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
Energy
Effort
Life
" 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. "
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Feet
World
Mountain
" 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
Kingdom
Spirit
God
" 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. "
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Thought
God
Action
" One mustn't close one's eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one. "
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Difficulty
Upset
More
" 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. "
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Man
Say
Respect
" Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution. "
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Down
Deep Down
Deep
" 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
Myself
Me
Turn
" 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. "
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Stars
Matter
Survive
" 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
" 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
Nothing
World
Tide
" 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
Good
Good People
Questions