Great Throughts Treasury

"Peace cannot mean anything but a higher process of conquest."

"Our human minds can scarcely even begin to comprehend such a length of time, or to imagine the various stages or levels of formation that the earth went through in becoming what we know it to be today. Yet what we can imagine?in fact, what we are beginning to realize with a frightening certainty?is that, although we are not able create matter or any new piece of the earth, we can do it great harm. And in so doing, we would harm as well all the life that this mother earth sustains. That which took so many billions of years to create, we, the earth?s ?superior beings,? could ruin more quickly than we dare to believe. And alas, it seems that we have already begun to do just that."

"Peace through conquest, work in joy. These are waiting for us beyond the line where empires are setup against other empires, in an interior totalization of the world upon itself, in the unanimous construction of a spirit of the earth."

"Personally, I stick to my that we are watching the, more than the, of a . The scandal for you, is that and should have come to this tragedy because they have sincerely tried the road of . But did they not precisely make a mistake on the true meaning of peace? Peace cannot mean anything but a HIGHER PROCESS OF CONQUEST? The world is bound to belong to its most active elements. ? Just now, the deserve to win because, however bad or mixed is their spirit, they have more spirit than the rest of the world. It is easy to criticize and despise them. But no spiritual aims or energy will ever succeed, or even deserve to succeed, unless it is able to spread and keep spreading a fifth column."

"Personally, I stick to my idea that we are watching the birth, more than the death, of a World. The scandal for you, is that England and France should have come to this tragedy because they have sincerely tried the road of peace. But did they not precisely make a mistake on the true meaning of peace? Peace cannot mean anything but a HIGHER PROCESS OF CONQUEST? The world is bound to belong to its most active elements. ? Just now, the Germans deserve to win because, however bad or mixed is their spirit, they have more spirit than the rest of the world. It is easy to criticize and despise the fifth column. But no spiritual aims or energy will ever succeed, or even deserve to succeed, unless it is able to spread and keep spreading a fifth column."

"Personally, I would forgive the ruthless ways of fascism, if fascism did not shelter anti-progressive forces"

"Religion and science, clearly represent, on the mental plane, two different meridians that it would be wrong not to separate (concordist mistake). But these meridians must necessarily meet at some pole of common vision (coherence): otherwise, everything in our field of thought and knowledge would collapse."

"Receive, O Lord, in its totality the Host which creation, drawn by your magnetism, presents to you at the dawn of a new day. This bread, our effort, is in itself, I know, nothing but an immense disintegration. This wine, our anguish, as yet, alas! is only an evaporating beverage. But in the depths of this inchoate Mass you have placed ? I am certain, for I feel it ? an irresistible and holy desire that moves us all, the impious as well as the faithful to cry out: O Lord, make us one!"

"Planetization is a phase in noogenesis? Planetization has begun with hominization and it is the final phase of hominization."

"Really I can see no coherent, and therefore scientific, way of grouping this immense succession of facts but as a gigantic psycho-biological operation, a sort of mega-synthesis, the 'super-arrangement' to which all the thinking elements of the earth find themselves today individually and collectively subject."

"Psychogenesis has led to man. Now it effaces itself, relieved or absorbed by another and a higher function?the engendering and subsequent development of the mind, in one word noogenesis. When for the first time in a living creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward."

"Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge."

"Research is the highest form of adoration"

"Religion, therefore, was not developed primarily as an easy way out, to provide shelter from the insoluble or intrusive difficulties met by the mind as it became active. In its real basis, it is biologically (we might almost say mechanically) the necessary counterpart to the release of the earth's spiritual energy: the human being by his appearance in nature, brings with him the emergence, ahead of him, of a divine pole to give him balance."

"Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole."

"Rome does not want me to return to my professorship. They do not seem to have taken a dislike to me, far from it; but they want to save Religion?..I would take enormous delight in breaking all ties."

"Scientists [still] refuse to consider man as an object of scientific scrutiny except through his body. The time has come to realize that an interpretation of the universe?even a positivist one?remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world."

"Should those who suffer be jealous of those who are not suffering as they are?"

"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. Receive, O Lord, in its totality the Host which creation, drawn by your magnetism, presents to you at the dawn of a new day. This bread, our effort, is in itself, I know, nothing but an immense disintegration. This wine, our anguish, as yet, alas! is only an evaporating beverage. But in the depths of this inchoate Mass you have placed ? I am certain, for I feel it ? an irresistible and holy desire that moves us all, the impious as well as the faithful to cry out: O Lord, make us one!"

"Since once again, Lord ? though this time not in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia ? I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labors and sufferings of the world. Over there, on the horizon, the sun has just touched with light the outermost fringe of the eastern sky. Once again, beneath this moving sheet of fire, the living surface of the earth wakes and trembles, and once again begins its fearful travail. I will place on my paten, O God, the harvest to be won by this renewal of labor. Into my chalice I shall pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from the earth?s fruits. My paten and my chalice are the depths of a soul laid widely open to all the forces which in a moment will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the Spirit. Grant me the remembrance and the mystic presence of all those whom the light is now awakening to the new day."

"Since Christ is above all Omega, i.e., the universal form of the world, he can attain his organic balance and plenitude only by mystically assimilating all that surrounds him."

"Something is afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth."

"Sometimes I am a bit afraid, when I think of the transposition to which I must submit my mind concerning the common notions of creation, inspiration, miracle, original sin, resurrection, etc., in order to be able to accept them."

"The coalescence of elements and the coalescence of stems, the spherical geometry of the earth and psychical curvature of the mind harmonizing to counterbalance the individual and collective forces of dispersion in the world and to impose unification--there at last we find the spring and secret of hominzation."

"The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as humanity found itself facing the forest, the sea and the stars. And since then we find evidence of it in all our experience of the great and the unbounded: in art, in poetry and in religion."

"The age of nations is past. That task before us, if we would not perish, is to build the earth... to help hear her wounds."

"The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth."

"The crises of our time are challenging the world religions to release a new spiritual force transcending religious, cultural and national boundaries into a new consciousness of the oneness of the human community... We affirm a new spirituality, divested of insularity and directed toward a planetary consciousness."

"The day will come when we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, the human being will have discovered fire."

"The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope."

"The divine influence that is active in the depths of matter and the dazzling centers where the fibers of the manifold meet: power as implacable as the world and power as warm as life, you whose forehead is of the whiteness of snow, whose eyes are of fire, and whose feet are brighter than molten gold, you whose hands imprison the stars; you are the first and the last, the living and the dead and the risen again; it is to you to whom our being cries out a desire as vast as the universe: "In truth you are our Lord and our God"."

"The general gathering together in which, by correlated actions of the without and the within of the earth, the totality of thinking units and thinking forces are engaged---the aggregation in a single block of a mankind whose fragments weld together and interpenetrate before our eyes in spite of (indeed in proportion to) their efforts to separate--all this becomes intelligible from top to bottom as soon as we perceive it as the natural culmination of a cosmic process of organisation which has never varied since those remote ages when our planet was young. First the molecules of carbon compounds with their thousands of atoms symmetrically grouped; next the cell which, within a very small volume, contains thousands of molecules linked in a complicated system; then the metazoa in which the cell is no more than an almost infinitesimal element; and later the manifold attempts made sporadically by the metazoa to enter into symbiosis and raise themselves to a higher biological condition."

"The host is like a blazing hearth from which flames spread their radiance, just as the spark that falls into the heather is soon surrounded by a wide circle of fire. So the sacramental host of bread is continually being encircled more closely by another infinitely larger host, which is nothing less than the universe itself. The world is the final and the real. The final and the real host into which Christ gradually descends until his time is fulfilled."

"The Hindus have been a disappointment to me. In them, too, the creative power seems in a pretty poor way. India seems just as incapable of self-government as China or Malaya."

"The Human Phenomenon lies in seeing. To be more is to be more united. But unity grows only if it is supported by an increase of consciousness, of vision... True physics is that which will someday succeed in integrating the totality of the human being into a coherent representation of the world."

"The human species is still only at the dawn of its existence."

"The matrix of spirit. Spirit is the higher state of matter... Matter is the matrix of consciousness and all around us consciousness, born of matter, is constantly advancing towards some ultra-human."

"The living world is constituted by consciousness clothed in flesh and bone."

"The more one considers this infinitely urgent problem of finding an over-all plan for building up the earth, the clearer it becomes that if we are to avoid the road of brute material force, there is no way out ahead except the road of comradeship and brotherhood - and that is as true of nations as it is of individuals: not jealous hostility, but friendly rivalry: not personal feeling, but the team spirit."

"The more complex a being, the more it is centered upon itself and, therefore, the more aware it becomes. In other words, the higher the degree of complexity in a living creature, the higher its consciousness, and vice versa. [Teilhard?s Law]"

"The most universal, the most formidable and the most mysterious of cosmic energies [love]... the primitive and universal psychic energy... the very blood of spiritual evolution."

"The obscure, the useless, the failures, should take joy in the superiority of the others whose triumph they lend support to or pay for."

"The only way forward is in the direction of a common passion, for nothing in the universe can ultimately resist the cumulative ardor of the collective soul."

"The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity."

"The quintessential good and beauty in life is what each has to offer to others valuing the gesture ourselves into confluence with the Word of God."

"The physical reasons are structural: it is the nature of union to consolidate - so long as the unification continues. And the psychological reasons are based on logical necessity: if the biological unification of the World could be conceived as being bound sooner or later to come to a halt, the anticipation of such an ending (see below) would be sufficient to produce an us an abhorrence of super-living and so kill our evolutive effort of co-reflection. And probably (in so far as to create is to unify) every possible Universe."

"The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human--these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth."

"The presence of the Incarnate Word penetrates like a universal element. It shines at the heart of all things."

"The scientist cannot prove directly that the hypothesis of a single Adam should be rejected. But he can show indirectly that the hypothesis has been made scientifically untenable by everything we believe we presently know about the biological laws of "speciation" (or "genesis of species")... This leaves us with two options. Either the essence of the scientific laws of speciation will change (which is hardly likely) or (which seems fully in accord with recent advances in exegesis) theologians will come to see one way or another that, in a universe as organically structured as ours where today we are in process of awakening a human solidarity far closer than the one they seek "in the bosom of Mother Eve," is readily found in the extraordinary internal liaison of a world in a state of cosmo- and anthropogenesis around us."

"The stars are laboratories in which the evolution of matter proceeds in the direction of large molecules."