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

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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

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

In the end, only the truth will survive.

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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

It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway.

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

It is a curious thing: man, the center 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.

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though limits to our abilities do not exist.

— 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