Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love.

You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think...of any man as damned

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.

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.

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.

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

Research is the highest form of adoration

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

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

The most empowering relationships are those in which each partner lifts the other to a higher possession of their own being.

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

The whole life lies in the verb seeing.

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.

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.

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.