Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (French Jesuit Scientist)

Marie Joseph Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was a French Jesuit theologian, philosopher, and paleontologist. He is best known for his hypothesis, blending science and Christianity, that man is evolving mentally and socially towards a perfect spiritual state.

Born in Orcines, Auvergne, Teilhard entered the Society of Jesus in 1899 and was ordained in 1911. He spent 1926–46 in China, where he discovered and studied Peking Man, a fossilized Stone-Age Pleistocene hominid.

Teilhard synthesized scientific evolutionary theory, theological interpretation, and mystical vision into a spectacularly creative and controversial view of man and the universe. He described the universe as a system evolving from stage to stage towards higher forms of consciousness, aimed at an eventual unity with God.

The Roman Catholic Church proclaimed that Teilhard’s views were heretical and his major works (e.g. Le Phénomène humain (1955; The Phenomenon of Man, 1959)) were published posthumously. Teilhard’s other notable works include Le Milieu Divi (1956; The Divine Milieu) and Hymn of the Universe (1964.)

Though influential in his time, Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man was discredited by the British biologist Peter Medawar in a famous review in Mind, 1961. Medawar wrote, “Its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself.”

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Topics: Potential, Possibilities

To love is to approach each other center to center.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Topics: Love

Love alone can unite living beings so as to complete and fulfill them… for it alone joins them by what is deepest in themselves. All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Topics: Love

It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though limits to our abilities do not exist.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Topics: Ignorance

Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Topics: Duty

The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Topics: Love

Someday, after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energy of love; and for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Topics: Love

Evolution is gaining the psychic zones of the world… life, being and ascent of consciousness, could not continue to advance indefinitely along its line without transforming itself in depth. The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence, of that very doubling back upon himself becomes in a flash able to raise himself to a new sphere.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Topics: Evolution

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
Topics: Belief

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
Topics: Love

The whole of life lies in the verb seeing.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Topics: Friends and Friendship

You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Topics: Spirituality, Spirit

The task for us now, if we are to survive, is to build the earth.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Topics: World

We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Topics: Togetherness, Unity

The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of oneself to others.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Topics: Generosity, Kindness, Happiness, Giving, Helpfulness, Goodwill

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