110+ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes On Death, Nature And Spirituality

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest. He is best known for his work on the evolution of the universe, and his belief in the Omega Point, which is the idea that the universe is evolving towards a point of higher consciousness. He is also known for his work on the development of the noosphere, which is the sphere of human thought. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on love, life, death.

Top 10 Pierre Teilhard De Chardin Quotes

1. The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.
2. 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.
3. The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.
4. The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others.
5. You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.
6. The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe.
7. Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.
8. What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but identifying them.
9. 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.
10. Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin Short Quotes

• Isolation is a blind alley....Nothing on the planet grows except by convergence.
• Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.
• Everything that rises must converge.
• Faith has need of the whole truth.
• It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.
• It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway.
• God is inexhaustibly attainable in the totality of our action.
• Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.
• Joy is the sheer evidence of God.
• Reach beyond your grasp. Your goals should be grand enough to get the best of you.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes About Love

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mystical of cosmic forces. Love is the primal and universal psychic energy. Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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

Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

When humans truly discover the power of love, it will prove more important than the harnessing of fire. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Someday, after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energy of love; and for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes About Life

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

All the communions of a life-time are one communion.All the communions of all men now living are one communion.All the communions of all men, present, past and future, are one communion. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Nothing can resist the person who smiles at life - I don't mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Let man live at a distance from God, and the universe remains neutral or hostile to him. But let man believe in God, and immediately all around him the elements, even the irksome, of the inevitable organize themselves into a friendly whole, ordered to the ultimate success of life. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Certain though I am - and ever more certain - that I must press on in life as though Christ awaited me at the term of the universe, at the same time I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ. Believing is not seeing. As much as anyone, I imagine, I walk in the shadows of faith. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The whole life lies in the verb seeing. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes About Death

You must overcome death by finding God in it. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since, when death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes About Nature

To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits - they may still be very distant - God has imposed on our natural understanding and power. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediately made use of and recast into something naturally directed. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

All ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman? — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes About Spirituality

We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes About Evolution

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The human person is the sum total of a 15 billion year chain of unbroken evolution now thinking about itself — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

To say that Christ is the term and motive force of evolution, to say that he manifests himself as 'evolver,' is implicitly to recognize that he becomes attainable in and through the whole process of evolution. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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

The stars are laboratories in which the evolution of matter proceeds in the direction of large molecules. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes About World

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

God loves everyone in the world who doesn't love himself. Does God love God? — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

It is done. Once again the Fire has penetrated the earth, not with the sudden crash of thunderbolt, riving the mountain tops: does the Master break down doors to enter His own home? Without earthquake, or thunderclap: the flame has lit up the whole world from within. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The task for us now, if we are to survive, is to build the earth. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Love is the most powerful and still most unknown energy in the world. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth. The more scientifically I regard the world, the less can I see any possible biological future for it except in the active consciousness of its unity. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

For ninety per cent of those who view him from outside, the Christian God looks like a great landowner administering his estates, the world. Now this conventional picture, which is too well justified by appearances, corresponds in no way to the dogmatic basis or point of view of the Gospels. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes About Universe

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The problem of evil, that is to say the reconciling of our failures, even the purely physical ones, with creative goodness and creative power, will always remain one of the most disturbing mysteries of the universe for both our hearts and our minds. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

In the divine milieu, all the elements of the universe touch each other by that which is most inward and ultimate in them. There they concentrate, little by little, all that is purest and most attractive in them without loss and without danger of subsequent corruption. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I came to China to follow my star and to steep myself in the raw regions of the universe. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

At the heart of our universe, each soul exists for God, in our Lord. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Truly, there is a Christian note which makes the whole World vibrate, like an immense gong, in the divine Christ. This note is unique and universal, and in it alone consists the Gospel. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

For me, the real earth is that chosen part of the universe, still almost universally dispersed and in course of gradual segregation, but which is little by little taking on body and form in Christ. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes About Earth

Whether one welcomes or deplores it, nothing is more surely and exactly characteristic of modern times than the irresistible invasion of the human world by technology. Mechanism invading like a tide all the places of the earth and all forms of social activity. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The earth's crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confine himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it the strength to escape from it. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Long before the awakening of thought on earth, manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which have no parallel today. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

What I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I would like to express the thoughts of a man who, having finally penetrated the partitions and ceilings of little countries, little coteries, little sects, rises above all these categories and finds himself a child and citizen of the Earth. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Love alone can unite living beings so as to complete and fulfill them... for it alone joins them by what is deepest in themselves. All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Famous Quotes And Sayings

Above all trust in the slow work of God. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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 — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

As a result of changes which, over the last century, have modified our empirically based pictures of the world and hence the moral value of many of its elements, the "human religious ideal" inclines to stress certain tendencies and to express itself in terms which seem, at first sight, no longer to coincide with the "christian religious ideal". — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Let us keep the discoveries and indisputable measurements of physics. But ... A more complete study of the movements of the world will oblige us, little by little, to turn it upside down; in other words, to discover that if things hold and hold together, it is only by reason of complexity, from above. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Psychogenesis has led to man. Now it effaces itself, relieved or absorbed by another and a higher function-the engendering and subsequent development of the mind, in one word noogenesis. When for the first time in a living creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

From the aspect of energy, renewed by radio-active phenomena, material corpuscles may now be treated as transient reservoirs of concentrated power. Though never found in a state of purity, but always more or less granulated (even in light) energy nowadays represents for science the most primitive form of universal stuff. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

This fundamental discovery that all bodies owe their origin to arrangements of single initial corpuscular type is the beacon that lights the history of the universe to our eyes. In its own way, matter obeyed from the beginning that great law of biology to which we shall have to recur time and time again, the law of "complexification." — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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.' — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Mankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalisation. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

For me, the Immaculate Conception is the feast of 'passive action,' the action that functions simply by the transmission through us of divine energy. Purity, in spite of outward appearances, is essentially an active virtue, because it concentrates God in us and on those who are subject to our influence. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Neither the Christian attitude of love for all mankind nor humane hopes for an organized society must cause us to forget that the 'human stratum' may not be homogeneous. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

A breeze passes in the night. When did it spring up? Whence does it come? Whither is it going? No man knows. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The number of known human fossils only increases slowly. But the manner of regarding and assessing them is capable of progressing rapidly, as indeed it does. In the absence of any absolutely sensational discovery in prehistory, there is an up-to-date and scientific manner of understanding man, which is solidly based on palaeontology. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

At the extreme temperature occurring in the stars, matter can only survive in its most dissociated states. Only simple bodies exist on these incandescent stars. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We must accept what science tells us, that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world - not only his flesh and bones but his incredible power of thought. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We are collaborators in creation. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions. There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me - I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers - a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

It often happens that what stares us in the face is the most difficult to perceive. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first 'feeling' for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man only progresses by slowly elaborating from age to age the essence and the totality of a universe deposited within him. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The dog knows, but does not know that he knows. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The past has revealed to me the structure of the future. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Surely the wake left behind by mankind's forward march reveals its movement just as clearly as the spray thrown up elsewhere by the prow. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Being happy is a matter of personal taste. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

When all is said and done, what constitutes the impregnable superiority of Christianity over all other types of Faith is that it is ever more consciously identified with a Christogenesis: in other words, with an awareness of the rise of a certain universal Presence which is at once immortalizing and unifying. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The quantity and quality of consciousness, one may say, have always been growing throughout geological times. In this respect man, in whom nervous organisation and therefore psychological powers have attained an undisputed maximum, may be considered, scientifically, as a natural centre of evolution of the primates. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Above all, trust in the slow work of God. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Life Lessons by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

1. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin taught that we are all connected and that we should strive to become more unified and harmonious with each other and with nature.
2. He believed that we should strive to develop our spiritual, mental, and physical capabilities to the fullest in order to reach our highest potential.
3. His teachings emphasize the importance of striving for personal growth, embracing change, and recognizing the interconnectedness of all things.