Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

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.

That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question.

Above all trust in the slow work of God. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

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

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.

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.

We are collaborators in creation.

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.

The stars are laboratories in which the evolution of matter proceeds in the direction of large molecules.

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.

If 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.

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

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.

Love is the most powerful and still most unknown energy in the world.

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.

Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces.

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.

Truth has to appear only once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze.

Joy is the sheer evidence of God.

You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think...of any man as damned

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being. ... the universal gravity of bodies, ... is merely the reverse or shadow of that which really moves nature. Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.

It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway.

The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe.

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.

We see not only thought as participating in evolution as an anomaly or as an epiphenomenon; but evolution as so reducible to and identifiable with a progress towards thought that the movement of our souls expresses and measures the very stages of progress of evolution itself. Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.

You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.

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?

Today, something is happening to the whole structure of human consciousness. A fresh kind of life is starting. Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world are seeking each other, so that the world may come into being.

Mankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalisation.

We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.

The future is in the hands of those who can give tomorrow's generations valid reasons to live and hope.

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

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.

It often happens that what stares us in the face is the most difficult to perceive.

There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.

And this is the best success I can dream for my life: to have spread a new vision of the world.

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.

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.

You must overcome death by finding God in it.

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.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

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.

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.

Isolation is a blind alley....Nothing on the planet grows except by convergence.

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 transformation of the planet 'as a whole.'

Psychogenesis has led to man. Now it effaces itself, relieved or absorbed by another and a higher function-the engendering and subsequent development of the mind, in one word noogenesis. When for the first time in a living creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward.

The human person is the sum total of a 15 billion year chain of unbroken evolution now thinking about itself