Quotes from 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.

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

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.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in 'renouncing' one's own self, by which I mean making up one's mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being 'happy' or 'unhappy' in the usual meaning of the words.

To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

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.

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

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.

So many things which once had distressed or revolted him — the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move — all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness.

Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.

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

In the end, only the truth will survive.

You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.

The farther and more deeply we penetrate into matter, by means of increasingly powerful methods, the more we are confounded by the interdependence of its parts.

It is the destiny of things real to destroy those that are artifice.

We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth's immense future, and can realise more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love. That, it seems to me, is the distillation of The Phenomenon of Man.

The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, 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.

In the shadow of death may we not look back to the past, but seek in utter darkness the dawn of God.

I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life.

There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others that have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe.

Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world. Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis -Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ