Quotes from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

You must overcome death by finding God in it.

At the heart of our universe, each soul exists for God, in our Lord.

Not everything is immediately good to those who seek God; but everything is capable of becoming good.

God is inexhaustibly attainable in the totality of our action.

Joy is the sheer evidence of God.

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.

Each elect soul ... possesses God directly and finds in that unique possession the fulfillment of his own individuality.

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.

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

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

The day is not far distant when humanity will realize that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration.

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.

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.

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.

You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think...of any man as damned

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

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.

Being happy is a matter of personal taste.

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it 'Le Milieu Divin,' but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

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

The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity.

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.

Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.

What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but identifying them.