Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

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

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Let us keep the discoveries and indisputable measurements of physics. But... A more complete study of the movements of the world will oblige us, little by little, to turn it upside down; in other words, to discover that if things hold and hold together, it is only by reason of complexity, from above.

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

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I can truly say — and this in virtue of the whole structure of my thought — that I now feel more indissolubly bound to the hierarchical Church and to the Christ of the Gospel than ever before in my life. Never has Christ seemed to me more real, more personal or more immense.

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
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
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?

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

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We are like soldiers who fall during the assault which leads to peace.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but expressing them. And so we cannot avoid this conclusion: it is biologically evident that to gain control of passion and so make it serve spirit must be a condition of progress. Sooner or later, then, the world will brush aside our incredulity and take this step : because whatever is the more true comes out into the open, and whatever is better is ultimately realized. The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.

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
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
Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.

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
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.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We have only to believe. And the more threatening and irreducible reality appears, the more firmly and desperately must we 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.

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

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin