Chardin Self Quotes & Sayings

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

As Christian mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said: "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." He was right. If we recognize the soul lesson, we can grow beyond suffering, and there is no stress in this state of understanding. — Brian L. Weiss

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

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

Man only progresses by slowly elaborating from age to age the essence and the totality of a universe deposited within him. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

One makes use of pigments, but one paints with one's feelings. — Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin

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

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

We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth's immense future, and can realise more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love. That, it seems to me, is the distillation of The Phenomenon of Man. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Humankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalization. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

The past has revealed to me the structure of the future. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

We have only to believe. And the more threatening and irreducible reality appears, the more firmly and desperately we must believe. Then, little by little, we shall see the universal horror unbend, and then smile upon us, and then take us in its more than human arms. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Individual human beings are so subtly developed through the centuries that it is strictly impermissible to compare any two men who are not contemporaries-that is to say are taken from two quite different times. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The task for us now, if we are to survive, is to build the earth. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Our self-awareness impresses itself on us so cogently, as individuals and as a species, that we cannot imagine ourselves out of existence, even though for hundreds of millions of years humans played no part in the flow of life on the planet. When Teilhard de Chardin wrote, "The phenomenon of Man was essentially foreordained from the beginning," he was speaking from the depth of individual experience, which we all share, as much as from religious philosophy. Our inability to imagine a world without Homo sapiens has a profound impact on our view of ourselves; it becomes seductively easy to imagine that our evolution was inevitable. And inevitability gives meaning to life, because there is a deep security in believing that the way things are is the way they were meant to be. — Richard E. Leakey

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

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

When humans truly discover the power of love, it will prove more important than the harnessing of fire. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

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

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

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The machine not only does it relieve us mechanically of a crushing weight of physical and mental labor; but by the miraculous enhancing of our senses, through its powers of enlargement, penetration and exact measurement, it constantly increases the scope and clarity of our perceptions. It fulfills the dream of all living creatures by satisfying our instinctive craving for the maximum of consciousness with a minimum of effort! Having embarked upon so profitable a path, how can Mankind fail to pursue it? — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The Church is like a great tree whose roots must be energetically anchored in the earth while its leaves are serenely exposed to the bright sunlight. In this way, she sums up a whole gamut of beats in a single living and all-embracing act, each one of which corresponds to a particular degree or a possible form of spiritualisation. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

As a result of changes which, over the last century, have modified our empirically based pictures of the world and hence the moral value of many of its elements, the "human religious ideal" inclines to stress certain tendencies and to express itself in terms which seem, at first sight, no longer to coincide with the "christian religious ideal". — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

The zest for life, which is the source of all passion and all insight, even divine, does not come to us from ourselves ... It is God who has to give us the impulse of wanting him. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The human person is the sum total of a 15 billion year chain of unbroken evolution now thinking about itself — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

God is inexhaustibly attainable in the totality of our action. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

In the shadow of death may we not look back to the past, but seek in utter darkness the dawn of God. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin