Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (French: [pjɛʁ tɛjaʁ də ʃaʁdɛ̃] (listen ); 1 May 1881 – 10 April 1955) was a French Jesuit priest, scientist, paleontologist, theologian, philosopher and teacher. He was Darwinian in outlook and the author of several influential theological and philosophical books.
He took part in the discovery of Peking Man. He conceived the vitalist idea of the Omega Point. With Vladimir Vernadsky he developed the concept of the noosphere.
In 1962, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith condemned several of Teilhard's works based on their alleged ambiguities and doctrinal errors. Some eminent Catholic figures, including Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, have made positive comments on some of his ideas since. The response to his writings by scientists has been mostly critical.
A breeze passes in the night. When did it spring up? Whence does it come? Whither is it going? No man knows.
To see more is to become more.
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.
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.
By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.
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.
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.
Research is the highest form of adoration.
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.
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.
The whole life lies in the verb seeing.
Mankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalisation.
Surely the wake left behind by mankind's forward march reveals its movement just as clearly as the spray thrown up elsewhere by the prow.
It is the destiny of things real to destroy those that are artifice.
In the end, only the truth will survive.
And this is the best success I can dream for my life: to have spread a new vision of the world.
Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.
Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.
The zest for life, which is the source of all passion and all insight, even divine, does not come to us from ourselves.... It is God who has to give us the impulse of wanting him.
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.
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.
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.
A breeze passes in the night. When did it spring up? Whence does it come? Whither is it going? No man knows.
Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought if one does achieve them, or worth worrying about if they evade one or are slow in coming. All that is really worth while is action -- faithful action, for the world, and in God.
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.
God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my shovel, my paint brush, my needle -- and my heart and thoughts.
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.
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.
You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.
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.
I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.
The human person is the sum total of a 15 billion year chain of unbroken evolution now thinking about itself.
The most empowering relationships are those in which each partner lifts the other to a higher possession of their own being.
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.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.
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.
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Love alone can unite living beings so as to complete and fulfill them... for it alone 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.
My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.
Truly, there is a Christian note which makes the whole World vibrate, like an immense gong, in the divine Christ. This note is unique and universal, and in it alone consists the Gospel.
By the sole fact of his entering into 'Thought,' man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.
A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music -- these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.
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.
What I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore.
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.
Religion, born of the earth's need for the disclosing of a god, is related to and co-extensive with not the individual man, but the whole of mankind.
To say that Christ is the term and motive force of evolution, to say that he manifests himself as 'evolver,' is implicitly to recognize that he becomes attainable in and through the whole process of evolution.
Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society. Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other's encroachments.
The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.
Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge -- the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.
Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.
Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.
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.
For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.
What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.
The facts tell us that no religious Faith releases -- or ever has released at any moment in History -- a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification than the Christianity of our own day -- and the more Catholic it is, the truer my words.
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.
Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.
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.'
Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.
From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.
At the extreme temperature occurring in the stars, matter can only survive in its most dissociated states. Only simple bodies exist on these incandescent stars.
The earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediately made use of and recast into something naturally directed.
Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.
To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.
Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.
Longer Version:
Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being. ... the universal gravity of bodies, ... is merely the reverse or shadow of that which really moves nature. Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.
The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.
Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.
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.
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.
A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and 'superlive,' as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.