Teilhard Quotes

My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

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

You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think ... of any man as damned ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

The task for us now, if we are to survive, is to build the earth. ~ 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

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

When humans truly discover the power of love, it will prove more important than the harnessing of fire. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Is evolution a theory, a system, or an 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. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

Teilhard merely seems to set the problem of man, as the utopian sees it, on lofty heights; yet, hi terminology, which mixes archeology, sociology, biology, astronomy, and a vulgarized theology, can, in fact, be translated at every turn into the language of collectivism and of totalitarian polices. ~ Thomas Molnar

Isolation is a blind alley ... Nothing on the planet grows except by convergence. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power. But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary. So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Humankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalization. ~ 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

We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth's immense future, and can realise more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love. That, it seems to me, is the distillation of The Phenomenon of Man. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross. ~ 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

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

Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow this is what evolution is. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability -
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually - let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don't try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete. ~ 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

In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

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

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

If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions. There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me - I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

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

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of 'escape of energy,' that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Reach beyond your grasp. Your goals should be grand enough to get the best of you. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

We have but one permanent home: heaven - that's still the old truth that we always have to re-learn - and it's only through the impact of sad experiences that we assimilate it. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

The Church is like a great tree whose roots must be energetically anchored in the earth while its leaves are serenely exposed to the bright sunlight. In this way, she sums up a whole gamut of beats in a single living and all-embracing act, each one of which corresponds to a particular degree or a possible form of spiritualisation. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love? ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen. ~ 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

The most empowering relationships are those in which each partner lifts the other to a higher possession of their own being. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

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

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

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed. ~ 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

At a finite distance in the future, a critical state of encounter will occur, an ultimate co-reflective Center. A focused conspiration will allure individual persons to identify with others in profound affinity. Because of thinking altogether, love will grow into Divinity. ~ 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

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things. ~ 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 have produced the human molecule. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

Evolution is gaining the psychic zones of the world ... life, being and ascent of consciousness, could not continue to advance indefinitely along its line without transforming itself in depth. The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence, of that very doubling back upon himself becomes in a flash able to raise himself to a new sphere. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

We had thought that we were human beings making a spiritual journey; it may be truer to say that we are spiritual beings making a human journey. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

As Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin knew, the future of humankind is God-consciousness. ~ Ken Wilber

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things ... as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples, the paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, and of unity with multitude - all these are called Utopian, and yet they are biologically necessary. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but identifying them. ~ 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

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

In the presence of a reader of Teilhard De Chardin I feel disarmed, nonplussed, ready to break down in tears. ~ Michel Houellebecq

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

I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Christ has conquered death, not only by suppressing its evil effects, but by reversing its sting. By virtue of Christ's rising again, nothing any longer kills inevitably, but everything is capable of becoming the blessed touch of the divine hands, the blessed influence of the will of God upon our lives. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

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

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

Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

Research is the highest form of adoration ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

In the end, only the truth will survive. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it 'Le Milieu Divin,' but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

The history of the living world can be summarised 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

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

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

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

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

I would like to express the thoughts of a man who, having finally penetrated the partitions and ceilings of little countries, little coteries, little sects, rises above all these categories and finds himself a child and citizen of the Earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience. ~ 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

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 directionally controlled transformation of the Noosphere "as a whole." ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

God loves everyone in the world who doesn't love himself. Does God love God? ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

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

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since, when death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

So many things which once had distressed or revolted him - the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move - all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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