If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions. There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me - I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction. - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 1 Share Now -
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 2 Share Now -
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 3 Share Now -
It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist. - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 4 Share Now -
Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began. - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 5 Share Now -
Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves. - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 6 Share Now -
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 7 Share Now -
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 8 Share Now -
From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science. - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 9 Share Now -
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 10 Share Now -
