Quotes from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Evolution) 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. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.

In no case does the energy required for synthesis appear to be provided by an influx of fresh capital, but by expenditure.

Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God.

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

The quintessential good and beauty in life is what each has to offer to others valuing the gesture ourselves into confluence with the Word of God.

evolutionary phenomena (of course including the phenomenon known as man) are processus, they can never be evaluated or even adequately described solely or mainly in terms of their origins: they must be defined by their direction

It seems to me that the Russian prestige is declining and that America holds in its hands the immediate future of the world: as long as America knows how to develop the sense of the earth at the same time as her sense of liberty. [Written from Peking, October 1945, on the eve of departure, after having been stuck there since the war began.]

There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision.

in the course of the growth of research; so that, when they reach the end of their analyses they cannot tell with any certainty whether the structure they have reached is the essence of the matter they are studying, or the reflection of their own thought.

As a result, man is the only successful type which has remained as a single interbreeding group or species, and has not radiated out into a number of biologically separated assemblages

But this quantum only takes on its full significance when we try to define it with regard to a concrete natural movement — that is to say, in duration.

for certain limited purposes it may be useful to think of phenomena as isolated statically in time, they are in point of fact never static:

His understanding of the method by which organisms become first individualised and then personalised gave him a number of valuable insights. Basically, the process depends on cephalisation — the differentiation of a head as the dominant guiding region of the body, forwardly directed, and containing the main sense-organs providing information about the outer world and also the main organ of co-ordination or brain.

man's evolution was unique in showing the dominance of convergence over divergence:

For in the nature of things everything that is faith must rise, and everything that rises must converge.

El pasado me ha revelado la estructura del futuro

The very fact of our becoming aware of this profound ordering of things will enable human collectivization to pass beyond the enforced phase, where it now is, into the free phase: that in which (men having at last understood that they are inseparably joined elements of a converging Whole, and having learnt in consequence to love the preordained forces that unite them) a natural union of affinity and sympathy will supersede the forces of compulsion.

There was something more: around this sentient protoplasmic layer, an ultimate envelope was beginning to become apparent to me, taking on its own individuality and gradually detaching itself like a luminous aura. This envelope was not only conscious but thinking, and from the time when I first became aware of it, it was always there that I found concentrated, in an ever more dazzling and consistent form, the essence or rather the very Soul of the Earth.

What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of courage. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but in expressing them correctly; and we can now see that it is biologically undeniable that unless we harness passion to the service of spirit there can be no progress. Sooner or later, then, and in spite of all our incredulity, the world will take this step— because the greater truth always prevails and the greater good emerges in the end.

Az ember az Å' számára a világ szeretetét jelentette, és itt zárul le a megszentelés köre.

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

Rien ne vaut la peine d'être trouvé que ce qui n'a jamais existé encore.

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

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.