Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

Personally, I stick to my idea that we are watching the birth, more than the death, of a World. The scandal for you, is that England and France should have come to this tragedy because they have sincerely tried the road of peace. But did they not precisely make a mistake on the true meaning of "peace"? Peace cannot mean anything but a HIGHER PROCESS OF CONQUEST. ... The world is bound to belong to its most active elements. ... Just now, the Germans deserve to win because, however bad or mixed is their spirit, they have more spirit than the rest of the world. It is easy to criticize and despise the fifth column. But no spiritual aims or energy will ever succeed, or even deserve to succeed, unless it is able to spread and keep spreading a fifth column.

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.

Noogenesis rises upwards in us and through us unceasingly. ...[T]he closer association of the grains of thought; the synthesis of individuals and of nations or races; the need of an autonomous and supreme personal focus to bind elementary personalities... in an atmosphere of active sympathy. ...[A]ll this results from the combined action of two curvatures—the roundness of the earth and the cosmic convergence of mind—in conformity with the law of complexity and consciousness.

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

man's evolution was unique in showing the dominance of convergence over divergence:

In sum, all the rest of this essay will be nothing but the story of the struggle in the universe between the unified multiple and the unorganized multitude: the full application of great Law of complexity and consciousness: a law that... implies a psychically convergent structure and curvature of the world.

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.

Rien ne vaut la peine d'être trouvé que ce qui n'a jamais existé encore.

Mankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalisation

The farther and more deeply we penetrate into matter, by means of increasingly powerful methods, the more we are confounded by the interdependence of its parts.

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.

...The very fact of our becoming aware of this profound ordering of things will enable human collectivization to pass beyond the enforced phase, where it now is, into the free phase: that in which (men having at last understood that they are inseparably joined elements of a converging Whole, and having learnt in consequence to love the preordained forces that unite them) a natural union of affinity and sympathy will supersede the forces of compulsion.

"Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world. Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis"
-Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

Since once again, Lord - though this time not in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia - I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the Real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world.

Over there, on the horizon, the sun has just touched with light the outermost fringe of the eastern sky. Once again, beneath this moving sheet of fire, the living surface of the earth wakes and trembles, and once again begins its fearful travail. I will place on my paten, O God, the harvest to be won by this renewal of labour. Into my chalice I shall pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from the earth’s fruits.

My paten and my chalice are the depths of a soul laid widely open to all the forces which in a moment will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the Spirit. Grant me the remembrance and the mystic presence of all those whom the light is now awakening to the new day . . .

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’.