Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

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
Not everything is immediately good to those who seek God; but everything is capable of becoming good.

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

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
More primordial than any idea, beauty will be manifest as the herald and generator or ideas.

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
We do not get what we call matter as a result of the simple aggregation and juxtaposition of atoms. For that, a mysterious identity must absorb and cement them, an influence at which our mind rebels in bewilderment at first, but which in the end must perforce accept.

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
Religion and science are the two conjugated faces of phases of one and the same act of complete knowledge — the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfill them.

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

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe. Beyond the vibrations with which we are familiar, the rainbow-like range of its colours is still in full growth. But, for all the fascination that the lower shades have for us, it is only towards the "ultra" that the creation of light advances. It is in these invisible and, we might almost say, immaterial zones that we can look for true initiation into unity. The depths we attribute to matter are no more than the reflection of the peaks of spirit.

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
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
The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human—these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth...

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
From an evolutionary point of view, man has stopped moving, if he ever did move.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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
The history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Christ has a cosmic body that extends throughout the universe.

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

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
Above all I feel that you must resign yourself to taking me as I am, that is, with the congenital quality (or weakness) which ever since my childhood has caused my spiritual life to be completely dominated by a sort of profound 'feeling' for the organic realness of the World. At first it was an ill-defined feeling in my mind and heart, but as the years have gone by it has gradually become a precise, compelling sense of the Universe's general convergence upon itself; a convergence which coincides with, and culminates at its zenith in, him in quo omina constant, and whom the Society has taught me to love.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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
The reality of spirit-matter is inevitably translated into and confirmed by a structure of the spirit.

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
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
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
By virtue of creation, and still more the incarnation, nothing here is profane for those who know how to see.

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
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
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