Top 230 Quotes & Sayings by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - Page 3

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

A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.

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.

Truth has to appear only once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze.

The future is in the hands of those who can give tomorrow's generations valid reasons to live and hope.

Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.

To see more is to become more.

And this is the best success I can dream for my life: to have spread a new vision of the world.

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.

Each element of the cosmos is positively woven from all the others...The universe holds together, and only one way of considering it is really possible, that is, to take it as a whole, in one piece.

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.

Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces.

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.

Without the slightest doubt there is something through which material and spiritual energy hold togehter and are complementary. In the last analysis, somehow or other, there must be a single energy operating in the world. And the first idea that occurs to us is that the 'soul' must be as it were the focal point of transformation at which, from all the points of nature, the forces of bodies converge, to become interiorised and sublimated in beauty and truth.

The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human - these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.

Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow this is what evolution is.

Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.

The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe.

Instead of standing on the shore and proving to ourselves that the ocean cannot carry us, let us venture on its waters just to see.

The day is not far distant when humanity will realize that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration.

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.

The future is more beautiful than all the pasts.

At a finite distance in the future, a critical state of encounter will occur, an ultimate co-reflective Center. A focused conspiration will allure individual persons to identify with others in profound affinity. Because of thinking altogether, love will grow into Divinity.

You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.

The whole life lies in the verb seeing.

What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but identifying them.

Isolation is a blind alley....Nothing on the planet grows except by convergence.

We have reached a crossroads in human evolution where the only road which leads forward is towards a common passion. . . To continue to place our hopes in a social order achieved by external violence would simply amount to our giving up all hope of carrying the Spirit of the Earth to its limits.

The only way forward is in the direction of a common passion, for nothing in the universe can ultimately resist the cumulative ardor of the collective soul.

To love is to approach each other center to center.

The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and its centrality . . . the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, furfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega . . . critical point simultaneously of emergence and emersion, of maturation and evasion.

You must overcome death by finding God in it.

We see not only thought as participating in evolution as an anomaly or as an epiphenomenon; but evolution as so reducible to and identifiable with a progress towards thought that the movement of our souls expresses and measures the very stages of progress of evolution itself. Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.

We are collaborators in creation.

We have only to believe. And the more threatening and irreducible reality appears, the more firmly and desperately we must believe. Then, little by little, we shall see the universal horror unbend, and then smile upon us, and then take us in its more than human arms.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

It often happens that what stares us in the face is the most difficult to perceive.

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

God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my (pick) shovel, my paint brush, my (sewing) needle - and my heart and thoughts.

Reach beyond your grasp. Your goals should be grand enough to get the best of you.

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

When humans truly discover the power of love, it will prove more important than the harnessing of fire.

The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth.

Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.

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.

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.

Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution.

The task for us now, if we are to survive, is to build the earth.

The dog knows, but does not know that he knows.

Everything that rises must converge.

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.

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.

Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.