Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

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.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Above all trust in the slow work of God. 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.

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.

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.

Love is the most powerful and still most unknown energy in the world.

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.

We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.

The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.

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.

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.

The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.

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.

There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.

The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others.

Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mystical of cosmic forces. Love is the primal and universal psychic energy. Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

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

The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe.

Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.

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

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.

Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.

Truth has to appear only once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze.

A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.

Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.

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.

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.

Isolation is a blind alley....Nothing on the planet grows except by convergence.

The day is not far distant when humanity will realize that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration.

Reach beyond your grasp. Your goals should be grand enough to get the best of you.

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.

We see not only thought as participating in evolution as an anomaly or as an epiphenomenon; but evolution as so reducible to and identifiable with a progress towards thought that the movement of our souls expresses and measures the very stages of progress of evolution itself. Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.

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

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

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.

The future is in the hands of those who can give tomorrow's generations valid reasons to live and hope.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everything that rises must converge.

And this is the best success I can dream for my life: to have spread a new vision of the world.

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.

Love is the internal, affectively apprehended, aspect of the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis.

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.

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.

The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth.

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