My Top 10 Quotes from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for your inspiration.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ was a French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a palaeontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of Peking Man. (source – Wikipedia)
Here is my selection of his quotes I considered my top 10 best.
1. We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
2. 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.
3. Nothing can resist the person who smiles at life – I don’t mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him.
4. 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.
5. One mustn’t close one’s eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one.
6. The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one’s self to others.
7. The more nobly a man wills and acts, the more avid he becomes for great and sublime aims to pursue. He will no longer be content with family, country, and the remunerative aspect of his work. He will want wider organisations to create, new paths to blaze, causes to uphold, truths to discover, an ideal to cherish and defend.
8. If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.
9. For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.
10. 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.
