Pierre Teilhard De Chardin Quotes & Sayings

The earth's crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

What disconcerts the modern world at its very roots is not being sure, and not seeing how it ever could be sure, that there is an outcome-a suitable outcome to evolution. Half our present uneasiness would be turned to happiness if we could once make up our minds to accept the facts and place the essence and the measure of our modern cosmogonies within a noogenesis. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him ... If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

This fundamental discovery that all bodies owe their origin to arrangements of single initial corpuscular type is the beacon that lights the history of the universe to our eyes. In its own way, matter obeyed from the beginning that great law of biology to which we shall have to recur time and time again, the law of "complexification." — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

At a finite distance in the future, a critical state of encounter will occur, an ultimate co-reflective Center. A focused conspiration will allure individual persons to identify with others in profound affinity. Because of thinking altogether, love will grow into Divinity. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

And now, as a germination of planetary dimensions, comes the thinking layer which over its full extent develops and intertwines its fibres, not to confuse and neutralise them but to reinforce them in the living unity of a single tissue. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Neither the Christian attitude of love for all mankind nor humane hopes for an organized society must cause us to forget that the 'human stratum' may not be homogeneous. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and 'superlive,' as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow this is what evolution is. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Whether one welcomes or deplores it, nothing is more surely and exactly characteristic of modern times than the irresistible invasion of the human world by technology. Mechanism invading like a tide all the places of the earth and all forms of social activity. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my (pick) shovel, my paint brush, my (sewing) needle - and my heart and thoughts. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Man only progresses by slowly elaborating from age to age the essence and the totality of a universe deposited within him. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

When all is said and done, what constitutes the impregnable superiority of Christianity over all other types of Faith is that it is ever more consciously identified with a Christogenesis: in other words, with an awareness of the rise of a certain universal Presence which is at once immortalizing and unifying. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The problem of evil, that is to say the reconciling of our failures, even the purely physical ones, with creative goodness and creative power, will always remain one of the most disturbing mysteries of the universe for both our hearts and our minds. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Joy is the sheer evidence of God. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confine himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it the strength to escape from it. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Isolation is a blind alley ... Nothing on the planet grows except by convergence. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

In the end, only the truth will survive. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it 'Le Milieu Divin,' but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

We now know from neural-net technology that when there are more connections between points in a system, and there is greater strength between these connections, there will be sudden leaps in intelligence, where intelligence is defined as success rate in performing a task. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Humanity has been sleeping-and still sleeps-lulled within the narrowly confining joys of its little closed loves. In the depths of the human multitude there slumbers an immense spiritual power which will manifest itself only when we have learnt how to break through the dividing walls of our egoism and raise ourselves up to an entirely new perspective, so that habitually and in a practical fashion we fix our gaze on the universal realities. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Our century is probably more religious than any other. How could it fail to be, with such problems to be solved? The only trouble is that it has not yet found a God it can adore. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

God loves everyone in the world who doesn't love himself. Does God love God? — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

More primordial than any idea, beauty will be manifest as the herald and generator or ideas. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

God is inexhaustibly attainable in the totality of our action. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love? — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The incomparable greatness of the religions of the East lies in their having been second to none in vibrating with the passion for unity. This note, which is essential to every form of mysticism, has even penetrated them so deeply that we find ourselves falling under a spell simply by uttering the names of their Gods. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves born by a current toward the open seas. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

You must overcome death by finding God in it. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples, the paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, and of unity with multitude - all these are called Utopian, and yet they are biologically necessary. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman? — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Energy is the measure of that which passes from one atom to another in the course of their transformations. A unifying power, then, but also, because the atom appears to become enriched or exhausted in the course of the exchange, the expression of structure. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Christ has conquered death, not only by suppressing its evil effects, but by reversing its sting. By virtue of Christ's rising again, nothing any longer kills inevitably, but everything is capable of becoming the blessed touch of the divine hands, the blessed influence of the will of God upon our lives. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things ... as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers - a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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 Chardin

To say that Christ is the term and motive force of evolution, to say that he manifests himself as 'evolver,' is implicitly to recognize that he becomes attainable in and through the whole process of evolution. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Evolution is gaining the psychic zones of the world ... life, being and ascent of consciousness, could not continue to advance indefinitely along its line without transforming itself in depth. The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence, of that very doubling back upon himself becomes in a flash able to raise himself to a new sphere. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Mankind is still embryonic ... [man is] the bud from which something more complicated and more centered than man himself should emerge. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth. The more scientifically I regard the world, the less can I see any possible biological future for it except in the active consciousness of its unity. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

We had thought that we were human beings making a spiritual journey; it may be truer to say that we are spiritual beings making a human journey. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Let man live at a distance from God, and the universe remains neutral or hostile to him. But let man believe in God, and immediately all around him the elements, even the irksome, of the inevitable organize themselves into a friendly whole, ordered to the ultimate success of life. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some 'Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.' — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

At the heart of every being lies creation's dream of a principle that will one day give organic form to its fragmented treasures. God is unity. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

We must accept what science tells us, that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world - not only his flesh and bones but his incredible power of thought. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

We have only to believe. And the more threatening and irreducible reality appears, the more firmly and desperately we must believe. Then, little by little, we shall see the universal horror unbend, and then smile upon us, and then take us in its more than human arms. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The past has revealed to me the structure of the future. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Religion, born of the earth's need for the disclosing of a god, is related to and co-extensive with not the individual man, but the whole of mankind. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought if one does achieve them, or worth worrying about if they evade one or are slow in coming. All that is really worth while is action - faithful action, for the world, and in God. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Each elect soul ... possesses God directly and finds in that unique possession the fulfillment of his own individuality. — 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

In the shadow of death may we not look back to the past, but seek in utter darkness the dawn of God. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

By the sole fact of his entering into 'Thought,' man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The human person is the sum total of a 15 billion year chain of unbroken evolution now thinking about itself — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The zest for life, which is the source of all passion and all insight, even divine, does not come to us from ourselves ... It is God who has to give us the impulse of wanting him. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

What I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

I would like to express the thoughts of a man who, having finally penetrated the partitions and ceilings of little countries, little coteries, little sects, rises above all these categories and finds himself a child and citizen of the Earth. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediately made use of and recast into something naturally directed. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The machine not only does it relieve us mechanically of a crushing weight of physical and mental labor; but by the miraculous enhancing of our senses, through its powers of enlargement, penetration and exact measurement, it constantly increases the scope and clarity of our perceptions. It fulfills the dream of all living creatures by satisfying our instinctive craving for the maximum of consciousness with a minimum of effort! Having embarked upon so profitable a path, how can Mankind fail to pursue it? — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Instead of standing on the shore and proving to ourselves that the ocean cannot carry us, let us venture on its waters just to see. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The day is not far distant when humanity will realize that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The most empowering relationships are those in which each partner lifts the other to a higher possession of their own being. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The reality of spirit-matter is inevitably translated into and confirmed by a structure of the spirit. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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 Chardin

Research is the highest form of adoration — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The future is more beautiful than all the pasts. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Nothing can resist the person who smiles at life - I don't mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

By means of all created things, without excaption, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The profoundly 'atomic' character of the universe is visible in everyday experience, in raindrops and grains of sand, in the hosts of the living, and the multitude of stars; even in the ashes of the dead. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power. But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary. So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Surely the wake left behind by mankind's forward march reveals its movement just as clearly as the spray thrown up elsewhere by the prow. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Truly, there is a Christian note which makes the whole World vibrate, like an immense gong, in the divine Christ. This note is unique and universal, and in it alone consists the Gospel. — 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