Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

Teilhard de Chardin, French philosopher and paleontologist, primarily wrote on the phenomenon of man and the future of the world.

“The future of the earth is in our hands.”

“My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him.”

“Christ is realized in evolution.”

“... what is the work of human works if not to establish, in and by means of each one of us, an absolutley original centre in which the universe reflects itself in a unique and inimitable way?” ~ The Phenomenon of Man

“Time and space are organically joined again so as to weave, together, the stuff of the universe.”

“Economic concentration, manifest in the unification of the earth's energies. Intellectual concentration, manifest in the unification of our knowledge in a coherent system (science). Social concentration, manifest in the unification of the human mass as a thinking whole.” ~ The Future of Man

“There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. I know very well that this idea of spirit-matter is regarded as a hybrid monster, a verbal exorcism of a duality which remains unresolved in its terms. But I remain convinced that the objections made to it arise from the mere fact that few people can make up their minds to abandon an old point of view and take the risk of a new idea. ... Biologists or philosophers cannot conceive a biosphere or noosphere because they are unwilling to abandon a certain narrow conception of individuality. Nevertheless, the step must be taken. For in fact, pure spirituality is as unconceivable as pure materiality. Just as, in a sense, there is no geometrical point, but as many structurally different points as there are methods of deriving them from different figures, so every spirit derives its reality and nature from a particular type of universal synthesis.” ~ A Sketch of a Personalistic Universe

“Man is not the center of the universe as once we thought in our simplicity, but something much more wonderful – the arrow pointing the way to the final unification of the world.”

“...what disconcerts the modern world at its very roots is not being sure, and not seeing how it ever could be sure, that there is an outcome – a suitable outcome – to that evolution.”

“Life is less certain than death.”

“Personally, I stick to my idea that we are watching the birth, more than the death, of a World. … Peace cannot mean anything but a HIGHER PROCESS OF CONQUEST. … The world is bound to belong to its most active elements. … Just now, the Germans deserve to win because, however bad or mixed is their spirit, they have more spirit than the rest of the world.” ~ letter from Peking, 1940, cited in The Duel, by John Lukas, 1990, p. 208

“Our century is probably more religious than any other. How could it fail to be, with such problems to be solved? The only trouble is that it has not yet found a God it can adore.” ~ The Phenomenon of Man

“For the observers of the Future, the greatest event will be the sudden appearance of a collective humane conscience and a human work to make.”

“The day will come when, after harnessing space, 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.” ~ Toward the Future

“We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousnesses to a sort of superconciousness. The earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope, a single unanimous reflection.”

“We only have to look around us to see how complexity and psychic temperature are still rising: and rising no longer on the scale of the individual but now on that of the planet. This indication is so familiar to us that we cannot but recognize the objective, experiential, reality of a transformation of the planet as a whole.” ~ The Heart of Matter (1950)

“A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.” ~ The Phenomenon of Man

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

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” ~ The Phenomenon of Man

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

“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, 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.”

“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.”

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

“The whole life lies in the verb seeing.”

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

“And here I am thinking of those astonishing electronic machines (the starting-point and hope of the young science of cybernetics), by which our mental capacity to calculate and combine is reinforced and multiplied by the process and to a degree that herald as astonishing advances in this direction as those that optical science has already produced for our power of vision.”

“In the spiritual life, as in all organic processes, everyone has their optimum and it is just as harmful to go beyond it as not to attain it.” ~ On Christian Asceticism, p. 100

“Since once again, O Lord, in the steppes of Asia, I have no bread, no wine, no altar, I will raise myself above those symbols to the pure majesty of reality, and I will offer to you, I, your priest, upon the altar of the entire earth, the labor and the suffering of the world.
Receive, O Lord, in its totality the Host which creation, drawn by your magnetism, presents to you at the dawn of a new day. This bread, our effort, is in itself, I know, nothing but an immense disintegration. This wine, our anguish, as yet, alas! is only an evaporating beverage. But in the depths of this inchoate Mass you have placed — I am certain, for I feel it — an irresistible and holy desire that moves us all, the impious as well as the faithful to cry out: ‘O Lord, make us one!'”
Prayer for Easter Sunday in the Ordos Desert of Inner Mongolia published in article “The Priest Who Haunts the Catholic World” Saturday Evening Post (12 October 1963)

previous page | top