Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

In the shadow of death may we not look back to the past, but seek in utter darkness the dawn of God.

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.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

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

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

Actuality, irreversibility. ...Omega ...is discovered ...at the end ...[I]n it the movement culminates. Yet... under this evolutive facet Omega still only reveals half of itself. While being the last term of its series, it is also outside all series. ...If by its very nature it did not escape from time and space which it gathers together, it would not be Omega.

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.

A breeze passes in the night. When did it spring up? Whence does it come? Whither is it going? No man knows.

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".

The reality of spirit-matter is inevitably translated into and confirmed by a structure of the spirit.

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.

Christ has a cosmic body that extends throughout the universe.

For in the nature of things everything that is faith must rise, and everything that rises must converge.

Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.

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