Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

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The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.

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
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. All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe — even a positivist one — remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.

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
As a result of changes which, over the last century, have modified our empirically based pictures of the world and hence the moral value of many of its elements, the "human religious ideal" inclines to stress certain tendencies and to express itself in terms which seem, at first sight, no longer to coincide with the "christian religious ideal".

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
God is inexhaustibly attainable in the totality of our action.

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
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.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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
Science will, in all probability, be increasingly impregnated by mysticism.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
All the communions of a life-time are one communion.
All the communions of all men now living are one communion.
All the communions of all men, present, past and future, are one communion.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin