Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

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

"The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others."

"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."

"Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution."

"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."

"The world is round so that friendship may encircle it."

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

"Is evolution a theory, a system, or an 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."

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

"Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society. Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other's encroachments."

"At the heart of every being lies creation's dream of a principle that will one day give organic form to its fragmented treasures. God is unity."

"Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples, the paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, and of unity with multitude - all these are called Utopian, and yet they are biologically necessary."

"A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music - these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence."

"It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist."

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

"Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery."

"Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being."

"A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and 'superlive,' as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so."

"Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves."

"By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross."

"We have but one permanent home: heaven - that's still the old truth that we always have to re-learn - and it's only through the impact of sad experiences that we assimilate it."

"Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe."

"Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge - the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them."

"In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches."

"One mustn't close one's eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one."

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

"Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution."

"To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian."

"The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species."

"There is neither spirit nor matter in the world. The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could have produced the human molecule."