Top 100 Pierre Teilhard De Chardin Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#3. The only way forward is in the direction of a common passion, for nothing in the universe can ultimately resist the cumulative ardor of the collective soul.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#9. 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
#10. The quintessential good and beauty in life is what each has to offer to others valuing the gesture ourselves into confluence with the Word of God.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#11. Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#16. Since once again, O Lord, in the steppes of Asia, I have no bread, no wine, no altar, I will raise myself above those symbols to the pure majesty of reality, and I will offer to you, I, your priest, upon the altar of the entire earth, the labor and the suffering of the world.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#21. Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#22. 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
#23. 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.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#28. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. The reality of spirit-matter is inevitably translated into and confirmed by a structure of the spirit.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#33. One mustn't close one's eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#34. 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
#35. 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
#37. Through fidelity, we situate ourselves and maintain ourselves in the hands of God so exactly as to become one with them in their action.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#39. 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
#40. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#44. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#53. 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
#54. The human person is the sum total of a 15 billion year chain of unbroken evolution now thinking about itself
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#56. Long before the awakening of thought on earth, manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which have no parallel today.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#57. 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.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#62. Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#63. When humans truly discover the power of love, it will prove more important than the harnessing of fire.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#77. Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#84. 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.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#85. 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
#86. Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#87. All ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Certain though I am - and ever more certain - that I must press on in life as though Christ awaited me at the term of the universe, at the same time I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ. Believing is not seeing. As much as anyone, I imagine, I walk in the shadows of faith.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
