Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

All people desire what they believe will make them happy. If a person is not full of desire for God, we can only conclude that he is engaged with another happiness.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

No wild enthusiast could rest, till half the world like him was possessed.

The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished?

I can never rest. I need to always do more. I always want to do more. I'm never going to be satisfied. That's it: Never be satisfied.

We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.

The big, blazing truth about man is that he has a heaven-sized hole in his heart, and nothing else can fill it. We pass our lives trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles. As Augustine said: Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.

To have a firm foundation as a child of God is something that so many people are longing for and wanting because they're searching for something more. There's got to be more out there. What is it? Well, I can tell you what it is. It's a relationship with the God of this universe, who loves you so much. That's what is it. That's what you're searching for. That's what you're longing for, and that's what you need.

Atheism tells him what he isn’t, and like all of us he yearns to know what he is.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death.

I remember that one time Carl Sagan was giving a talk, and he spelled out, in a kind of withering succession, these great theories of demotion that science has dealt us, all of the ways in which science is telling us we are not who we would like to believe we are. At the end of it, a young man came up to him and he said: "What do you give us in return? Now that you've taken everything from us? What meaning is left, if everything that I've been taught since I was a child turns out to be untrue?" Carl looked at him and said, Do something meaningful.

Built into human makeup is a longing for a 'more' that the world of everyday experience cannot requite.

Jazz was home. It created a hunger within me.

Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering.

Whoever desires to remain faithful to Jesus must communicate faith as he did, not by compelling assent but by presenting it as a true answer to basic thirst. Rather than looking back nostalgically on a time when Christians wielded more power, I suggest another approach: that we regard ourselves as subversives operating within the broader culture.

Greed is supported by an endless cast of what-ifs. Greedy people can never have enough to satisfy the need they feel in light of every conceivable eventuality.

I want a blaze of light to flame in me forever in a timeless, dear love of everything. And why should I pretend to want anything else?

It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated; the only question is: Is it true in and for itself?

What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto.

More than anything, the journal wanted. It wanted more than it could hold, more than words could describe, more than diagrams could illustrate. Longing burst from the pages, in every frantic line and every hectic sketch and every dark-printed definition. There was something pained and melancholy about it.

I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.

I need for there to be something bigger than me. I need someone to put awe inside me; I need to come second to someone who has everything figured out.