Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Caves are the privileged homes of the documents of prehistory.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.

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
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
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
Humanity has been sleeping-and still sleeps-lulled within the narrowly confining joys of its little closed loves. In the depths of the human multitude there slumbers an immense spiritual power which will manifest itself only when we have learnt how to break through the dividing walls of our egoism and raise ourselves up to an entirely new perspective, so that habitually and in a practical fashion we fix our gaze on the universal realities.

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

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
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
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
Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.

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 produce the human molecule.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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
The world can no more have two summits than a circumference can have two centres.

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

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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
Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
At the heart of our universe, each soul exists for God, in our Lord.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Through the incarnation God descended into nature in order to super-animate and take it back to him.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Biologists or philosophers cannot conceive a biosphere or noosphere because they are unwilling to abandon a certain narrow conception of individuality. Nevertheless, the step must be taken.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The stars are laboratories in which the evolution of matter proceeds in the direction of large molecules.

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
In one manner or the other, it still remains true that, even in the view of a mere biologist, the human epic resembles nothing so much as a way of the Cross.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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