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.
Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.
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.
All I know is that, thanks to a sort of habit which has always been ingrained in me, I have never, at any moment of my life, experienced the least difficulty in addressing myself to God as to a supreme Someone.
Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.
Being happy is a matter of personal taste.
Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.
Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.
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.
I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.
I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.
The incomparable greatness of the religions of the East lies in their having been second to none in vibrating with the passion for unity. This note, which is essential to every form of mysticism, has even penetrated them so deeply that we find ourselves falling under a spell simply by uttering the names of their Gods.
Long before the awakening of thought on earth, manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which have no parallel today.
Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.
I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought... The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.
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.
I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits - they may still be very distant - God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.
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.
Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.
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.
Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.
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.
All ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances.
Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.
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.'
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.
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.
One mustn't close one's eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one.
For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.
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.
Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.
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.
It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.
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.
Through fidelity, we situate ourselves and maintain ourselves in the hands of God so exactly as to become one with them in their action.
To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?
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.
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.
How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?
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 came to China to follow my star and to steep myself in the raw regions of the universe.
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.
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.
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.
Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.
We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.
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.
Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.
Christ has conquered death, not only by suppressing its evil effects, but by reversing its sting. By virtue of Christ's rising again, nothing any longer kills inevitably, but everything is capable of becoming the blessed touch of the divine hands, the blessed influence of the will of God upon our lives.