Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

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

The phrase 'Sense of the Earth' should be understood to mean the passionate concern for our common destiny which draws the thinking part of life ever further onward. The only truly natural and real human unity is the spirit of the Earth. . . .The sense of Earth is the irresistable pressure which will come at the right moment to unite them (humankind) in a common passion.The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves born by a current towards the open seas.

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.

The future is more beautiful than all the pasts.

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

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.

So many things which once had distressed or revolted him — the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move — all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness.

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

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

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

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.

Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.

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.

God loves everyone in the world who doesn't love himself. Does God love God?

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

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.

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

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."

Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.

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

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.

A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.

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.

Over every living thing which is to spring up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day say again the words: This is my Body. And over every death-force which waits in readiness to corrode, to wither, to cut down, speak again your commanding words which express the supreme mystery of faith: This is my Blood.

The time has come to realise 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.

To see more is to become more.

The dog knows, but does not know that he knows.

The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love.

He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.

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.

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.

Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mystical of cosmic forces. Love is the primal and universal psychic energy. Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.

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.

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

Not everything is immediately good to those who seek God; but everything is capable of becoming good.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

More primordial than any idea, beauty will be manifest as the herald and generator or ideas.

Reach beyond your grasp. Your goals should be grand enough to get the best of you.

The whole life lies in the verb seeing.

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

Specialisation paralyses, ultra-specialisation kills. Palaeontology is littered with such catastrophes.

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

The task for us now, if we are to survive, is to build the earth.

The past has revealed to me the structure of the future.

It is not our heads or our bodies which we must bring together, but our hearts. . . . Humanity. . . is building its composite brain beneath our eyes. May it not be that tomorrow, through the logical and biological deepening of the movement drawing it together, it will find its heart, without which the ultimate wholeness of its power of unification can never be achieved?

Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.