Pierre Teilhard de Chardin > Quotes

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“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

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

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

“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

“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

“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

“Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.”
― Teilhard de Chardin

“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

“We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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

“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”
― Teillard 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

“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, The Phenomenon of Man

“You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think...of any man as damned”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“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.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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

“Research is the highest form of adoration”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“The most empowering relationships are those in which each partner lifts the other to a higher possession of their own being.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate one another.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“The whole life lies in the verb seeing.”
― Teilhard de Chardin

“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.”
― Teilhard de Chardin

“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.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe

“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