Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Philosopher

1881-05-01

Quotes by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

• I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life.

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• Above all, trust in the slow work of God.We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.We should like to skip the intermediate stages.We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time.And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually— let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste.Don't try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you,and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

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• The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.

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• There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.

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• We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

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• The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe— even a positivist one— remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.

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• The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love.

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• The most empowering relationships are those in which each partner lifts the other to a higher possession of their own being.

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• You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think...of any man as damned

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• So many things which once had distressed or revolted him — the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move — all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness.

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• Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

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• Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.

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• He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.

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• Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things...as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.

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• Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

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• I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life.

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• The most empowering relationships are those in which each partner lifts the other to a higher possession of their own being.

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• So many things which once had distressed or revolted him — the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move — all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness.

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• The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.

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• The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love.

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