Pierre Teilhard 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

The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Let us keep the discoveries and indisputable measurements of physics. But ... A more complete study of the movements of the world will oblige us, little by little, to turn it upside down; in other words, to discover that if things hold and hold together, it is only by reason of complexity, from above. — 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

As Christian mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said: "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." He was right. If we recognize the soul lesson, we can grow beyond suffering, and there is no stress in this state of understanding. — Brian L. Weiss

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

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

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 ... — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

There is neither spirit nor matter in the world. The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could have produced the human molecule. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The world can no more have two summits than a circumference can have two centres. — 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

The history of the kingdom of God is, directly, one of a reunion. The total divine milieu is formed by the incorporation of every elected spirit in Jesus Christ. — 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

To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else. — 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

Faith has need of the whole truth. — 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

Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. — 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

Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation. — 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

All I know is that, thanks to a sort of habit which has always been ingrained in me, I have never, at any moment of my life, experienced the least difficulty in addressing myself to God as to a supreme Someone. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The whole life lies in the verb seeing. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

We only have to look around us to see how complexity ... and psychic "temperature" are still rising: and rising no longer on the scale of the individual but now on that of the planet. This indication is so familiar to us that we cannot but recognize the objective, experiential, reality of a directionally controlled transformation of the Noosphere "as a whole." — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and its centrality ... the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, furfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega ... critical point simultaneously of emergence and emersion, of maturation and evasion. — 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

The world is round so that friendship may encircle it. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

Each element of the cosmos is positively woven from all the others ... The universe holds together, and only one way of considering it is really possible, that is, to take it as a whole, in one piece. — 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

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

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

For me, the Immaculate Conception is the feast of 'passive action,' the action that functions simply by the transmission through us of divine energy. Purity, in spite of outward appearances, is essentially an active virtue, because it concentrates God in us and on those who are subject to our influence. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The farther and more deeply we penetrate into matter, by means of increasingly powerful methods, the more we are confounded by the interdependence of its parts. — 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

To write the true natural history of the world, we should need to be able to follow it from within. It would thus appear no longer as an interlocking succession of structural types replacing one another, but as an ascension of inner sap spreading out in a forest of consolidated instincts. Right at its base, the living world is constituted by conscious clothes in flesh and bone. — 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

I came to China to follow my star and to steep myself in the raw regions of the universe. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

In the spiritual life, as in all organic processes, everyone has their optimum and it is just as harmful to go beyond it as not to attain it. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

Without the slightest doubt there is something through which material and spiritual energy hold togehter and are complementary. In the last analysis, somehow or other, there must be a single energy operating in the world. And the first idea that occurs to us is that the 'soul' must be as it were the focal point of transformation at which, from all the points of nature, the forces of bodies converge, to become interiorised and sublimated in beauty and truth. — 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

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

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed. — 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

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music - these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence. — 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

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

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

To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian. — 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

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

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

At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first 'feeling' for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus. — 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

For me, the real earth is that chosen part of the universe, still almost universally dispersed and in course of gradual segregation, but which is little by little taking on body and form in Christ. — 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

We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth's immense future, and can realise more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love. That, it seems to me, is the distillation of The Phenomenon of Man. — 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

As a result of changes which, over the last century, have modified our empirically based pictures of the world and hence the moral value of many of its elements, the "human religious ideal" inclines to stress certain tendencies and to express itself in terms which seem, at first sight, no longer to coincide with the "christian religious ideal". — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The Church is like a great tree whose roots must be energetically anchored in the earth while its leaves are serenely exposed to the bright sunlight. In this way, she sums up a whole gamut of beats in a single living and all-embracing act, each one of which corresponds to a particular degree or a possible form of spiritualisation. — 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

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world ... Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

From the aspect of energy, renewed by radio-active phenomena, material corpuscles may now be treated as transient reservoirs of concentrated power. Though never found in a state of purity, but always more or less granulated (even in light) energy nowadays represents for science the most primitive form of universal stuff. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

It is done. Once again the Fire has penetrated the earth, not with the sudden crash of thunderbolt, riving the mountain tops: does the Master break down doors to enter His own home? Without earthquake, or thunderclap: the flame has lit up the whole world from within. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

In the divine milieu, all the elements of the universe touch each other by that which is most inward and ultimate in them. There they concentrate, little by little, all that is purest and most attractive in them without loss and without danger of subsequent corruption. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Religion 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 Chardin

God is inexhaustibly attainable in the totality of our action. — 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

The facts tell us that no religious Faith releases - or ever has released at any moment in History - a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification than the Christianity of our own day - and the more Catholic it is, the truer my words. — 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

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

A breeze passes in the night. When did it spring up? Whence does it come? Whither is it going? No man knows. — 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

The task for us now, if we are to survive, is to build the earth. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Individual human beings are so subtly developed through the centuries that it is strictly impermissible to compare any two men who are not contemporaries-that is to say are taken from two quite different times. — 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

Humankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalization. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter. — 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