Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The only way forward is in the direction of a common passion, for nothing in the universe can ultimately resist the cumulative ardor of the collective soul.Collection: Passion
Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces.Collection: Love Is
The day is not far distant when humanity will realize that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration.Collection: Suicide
That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question.Collection: Science
And this is the best success I can dream for my life: to have spread a new vision of the world.Collection: Dream
Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow this is what evolution is.Collection: Science
It often happens that what stares us in the face is the most difficult to perceive.Collection: Faces
We have only to believe. And the more threatening and irreducible reality appears, the more firmly and desperately we must 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.Collection: Believe
Without the slightest doubt there is something through which material and spiritual energy hold togehter and are complementary. In the last analysis, somehow or other, there must be a single energy operating in the world. And the first idea that occurs to us is that the 'soul' must be as it were the focal point of transformation at which, from all the points of nature, the forces of bodies converge, to become interiorised and sublimated in beauty and truth.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Boredom
You must overcome death by finding God in it.Collection: Death
Love is the internal, affectively apprehended, aspect of the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis.Collection: Love
The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth.Collection: Past
To love is to approach each other center to center.Collection: Love
We have reached a crossroads in human evolution where the only road which leads forward is towards a common passion. . . To continue to place our hopes in a social order achieved by external violence would simply amount to our giving up all hope of carrying the Spirit of the Earth to its limits.Collection: Giving Up
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.Collection: Science
Instead of standing on the shore and proving to ourselves that the ocean cannot carry us, let us venture on its waters just to see.Collection: Ocean
The zest for life, which is the source of all passion and all insight, even divine, does not come to us from ourselves.... It is God who has to give us the impulse of wanting him.Collection: Passion
By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.Collection: Virtue
The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love.Collection: Profound
The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and its centrality . . . the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, furfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega . . . critical point simultaneously of emergence and emersion, of maturation and evasion.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Yield
The task for us now, if we are to survive, is to build the earth.Collection: Tasks
Reach beyond your grasp. Your goals should be grand enough to get the best of you.Collection: Goal
The human person is the sum total of a 15 billion year chain of unbroken evolution now thinking about itselfCollection: Thinking
We see not only thought as participating in evolution as an anomaly or as an epiphenomenon; but evolution as so reducible to and identifiable with a progress towards thought that the movement of our souls expresses and measures the very stages of progress of evolution itself. Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Perception
Each element of the cosmos is positively woven from all the others...The universe holds together, and only one way of considering it is really possible, that is, to take it as a whole, in one piece.Collection: Together
Truth has to appear only once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze.Collection: Mind
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 layersCollection: Mean
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.Collection: Blessed
The dog knows, but does not know that he knows.Collection: Dog
Isolation is a blind alley....Nothing on the planet grows except by convergence.Collection: Isolation
The future is in the hands of those who can give tomorrow's generations valid reasons to live and hope.Collection: Hands
We had thought that we were human beings making a spiritual journey; it may be truer to say that we are spiritual beings making a human journey.Collection: Spiritual
At a finite distance in the future, a critical state of encounter will occur, an ultimate co-reflective Center. A focused conspiration will allure individual persons to identify with others in profound affinity. Because of thinking altogether, love will grow into Divinity.Collection: Distance
The phrase 'Sense of the Earth' should be understood to mean the passionate concern for our common destiny which draws the thinking part of life ever further onward. The only truly natural and real human unity is the spirit of the Earth. . . .The sense of Earth is the irresistable pressure which will come at the right moment to unite them (humankind) in a common passion.The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth.Collection: Real
When humans truly discover the power of love, it will prove more important than the harnessing of fire.Collection: Fire
We are collaborators in creation.Collection: Creation
A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.Collection: Life
The future is more beautiful than all the pasts.Collection: Beautiful
The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human - these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth.Collection: Spiritual
The whole life lies in the verb seeing.Collection: Lying
Individual human beings are so subtly developed through the centuries that it is strictly impermissible to compare any two men who are not contemporaries-that is to say are taken from two quite different times.Collection: Taken
The reality of spirit-matter is inevitably translated into and confirmed by a structure of the spirit.Collection: Reality
A breeze passes in the night. When did it spring up? Whence does it come? Whither is it going? No man knows.Collection: Spring
In the spiritual life, as in all organic processes, everyone has their optimum and it is just as harmful to go beyond it as not to attain it.Collection: Spiritual
Not everything is immediately good to those who seek God; but everything is capable of becoming good.Collection: Becoming
Each elect soul ... possesses God directly and finds in that unique possession the fulfillment of his own individuality.Collection: Unique