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 ChardinThe stars are laboratories in which the evolution of matter proceeds in the direction of large molecules.
Pierre Teilhard de ChardinIf there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level - indeed in the molecule itself - it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form... Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.
Pierre Teilhard de ChardinIsolation is a blind alley....Nothing on the planet grows except by convergence.
Pierre Teilhard de ChardinOur 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 ChardinThe idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered with myriad grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection...A new domain of psychical expansion- that is what we lack. And it is staring us in the face if we would only raise our heads to look at it.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin