Quotes from 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.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

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.

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.

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

We have only to believe. And the more threatening and irreducible reality appears, the more firmly and desperately must we 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.

The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.

In one manner or the other, it still remains true that, even in the view of a mere biologist, the human epic resembles nothing so much as a way of the Cross.

Evolution is gaining the psychic zones of the world... life, being and ascent of consciousness, could not continue to advance indefinitely along its line without transforming itself in depth. The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence, of that very doubling back upon himself becomes in a flash able to raise himself to a new sphere.

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.

Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.

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.

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

The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of oneself to others.

Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.

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.

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.

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

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.

Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.

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 future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.

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

We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.