The whole life lies in the verb seeing.
Pierre Teilhard De ChardinRead
The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in 'renouncing' one's own self, by which I mean making up one's mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being 'happy' or 'unhappy' in the usual meaning of the words.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True peace comes from letting go of the need for happiness and unhappiness.
In this quote, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin suggests that true repose, or peace of mind, is attained not through the pursuit of happiness or the avoidance of unhappiness, but through a deep understanding of oneself and the world. He emphasizes the importance of renouncing the ego's desire for emotional highs and lows, advocating instead for a more detached, philosophical approach to life that transcends conventional judgments about happiness.
Themes
ReposeRenounceSelfHappinessUnhappinessPeace
In practice
Example use cases
In a thoughtful speech about finding peace in life's challenges, one might use this quote to illustrate the depth of inner tranquility.
More from Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
All quotes βReligion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge - the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.
Pierre Teilhard De ChardinRead
The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.
Pierre Teilhard De ChardinRead
We may, perhaps, imagine that the creation was finished long ago. But that would be quite wrong. It continues still more magnificently, and at the highest levels of the world.
Pierre Teilhard De ChardinRead
Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and 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.
Pierre Teilhard De ChardinRead
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 ChardinRead
Similar quotes
Two of the hardest words in the language to rhyme are life and love. Of all words!
Stephen SondheimRead
If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
Noam ChomskyRead
I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I felt that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actor, kidding ourselves on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between those two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.
Hunter S. ThompsonRead
In the usual progress of things, the necessities of a nation in every stage of its existence will be found at least equal to its resources.
Alexander HamiltonRead
You are not in the world...the world is in you," what did he mean? [That is, you are not in the world," that is, there is no "you" that is real or in any world. "The world is in you" means that the world is in your "mind" and is nothing more than a figment of your programming-and-conditioning-induced imaginings.]
Sri Nisargadatta MaharajRead
I'm the type who'd be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn't going to. I'm the type who'd like to sit home and watch every party that I'm invited to on a monitor in my bedroom.
Andy WarholRead