Thoughts from Teilhard
Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history
of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Love is the highest form of human energy.
The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth.
Moral maturity is reached on the day we realize that we really have only two choices in life: genuflect before something higher or begin to self-destruct.
The fires of Hell and the fires of Heaven are not two different forces but contrary manifestations of the same energy.
Man must be convinced of the merit of work and its value. The world is not given to man as is the wheel to the caged squirrel, just to keep him busy in a vacuum.
The Hand of God upon Us .... the world is still being created and it is Christ who is reaching His fulfillment in it.
Gentleness is our first source of strength, the first also, perhaps, of the visible virtues. Harshness or contempt is so agreeable a temptation.
The Christian souls in my circle are very few in number but it is as clear as daylight that they are, with very few exceptions, the only ones that are
'fulfilled', the only ones that are truly human. And so the apparent failure of religion is in reality a triumphant vindication of the need of it and its effectiveness.
We may imagine perhaps that creation was finished long ago. This is not true. It continues more gloriously than ever ... and we serve to complete it, even with the humblest work of
our hands.
All the universe is corpuscular (granular), ... atoms, stars, man. The inner reserve (functional capacity) of each corpuscle always increases as it complexifies.
Of all things the most difficult to contain is the expansion of an idea. It is enough for truth to appear just once, to a single mind. From that moment nothing can prevent its spreading until it lights up the world. For whatever is truer will come to light, and whatever is better will ultimately become reality.
Since once again, O Lord, in the steppes of Asia, I have no bread, no wine, no altar, I will raise myself above those symbols to the pure majesty of reality, and I will offer to you, I, your priest, upon the altar of the entire earth, the labor and the suffering of the world.
He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.
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.
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.
Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.
The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others.
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
When people love what they criticize, they can criticize without danger.
We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.