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.

We are spiritual beings, having a human experience.

What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but expressing them. And so we cannot avoid this conclusion: it is biologically evident that to gain control of passion and so make it serve spirit must be a condition of progress. Sooner or later, then, the world will brush aside our incredulity and take this step : because whatever is the more true comes out into the open, and whatever is better is ultimately realized. The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

I can truly say — and this in virtue of the whole structure of my thought — that I now feel more indissolubly bound to the hierarchical Church and to the Christ of the Gospel than ever before in my life. Never has Christ seemed to me more real, more personal or more immense.

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.

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.

It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway.

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

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.

La única religión aceptable para el hombre es la que le enseñará ante todo, a conocer, amar y servir apasionadamente al Universo del cual es el elemento más importante.

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 can no more have two summits than a circumference can have two centres.

By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.

There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision.

Now when sufficient elements have sufficiently agglomerated, this essentially convergent movement will attain such intensity and such quality that mankind, taken as a whole, will be obliged—as happened to the individual forces of instinct—to reflect upon itself at a single point; that is to say, in this case, to abandon its organo-planetary foothold so as to shift its centre on to the transcendent centre of its increasing concentration. This will be the end and the fulfillment of the spirit of the earth. The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the , which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and its centrality. The end of the world: the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, fulfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega.